Rubénerd!

The airport scare iPhone episode!

I caved and bought an iPhone; the reasons why I was disappointed with Google Android; sophisticated text messages from my sister; the LG Secret mobile phone; snapping Australian Medicare cards; New Zealand Australia Centrelink migrations; Gordon Brown's Labour speech in the UK; palindromic numbers; distrusting spell checkers with gibberish; fancy new embedded Rubenerd Show cover art; compressed graphics looking crap; antihistamines; the term podcast; my take on the Andy Kaufman situation on The Overnightscape; my dad setting off security at Adelaide Airport; the iPhone keyboard; the TwitterFon iPhone Twitter client; I love the Objective-C programming language; fond memories of the Palm Tungsten W and Palm OS; basing your opinion of devices just from spec sheets; practical use for GPS and Safari; and hallucinogenic throat lozenges!

Music for this episode performed by Chris Juergensen from Magnatune.com.

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I've been looking for a good, thick tome to work through to help me learn the Objective C programming language. Just like Ruby, I like the fact Objective C was also inspired from Smalltalk and given my past (icky) experience with C++ and the fact I run Mac OS X and FreeBSD (which has the GNU compilers) I figured it would be a cool language to work on for another study project, and gosh it just looks like a really interesting computer language. Girls love it when I talk like that you see.

Alas, Singapore seems to have as many books on Objective C as elephants have tails. Wait, elephants do have tails. That was a stupid comparison.

Anyway I've searched at Borders, Kinokuniya, Times, Popular... and nobody has anything other than For Dummies books on basic Cocoa development. My personal preference is the O'Reilly book series simply because I remember having lots of fun learning Perl and Python from their books back when I was in high school and I like their format. The Dummies series were fun to learn Visual Basic from back when I was in primary, but these days they seem to chatty to me.

I know I'm probably being really picky, but everyone learns in different ways and I find O'Reilly books to click with me the best. So it begs the question, does anyone know of any good places to buy O'Reilly books (or books that follow a similar style) on Objective C in Singapore?

My next try will be to go to that really good computer book shop in Funan Centre, I'm hoping they might have a better range that some of the generic chains. Or I could renew my subscription to Safrai Books Online, I'm sure they'd have some good material.