Livre d'Or

learning to decide what exactly you want your program to do, and how to structure it, that's where I'm on a very steep learning curve just now.

Well, yes, that's the _programming_ part, as opposed to 'learning the syntax.' And there's very little advice on it, and at least in Mac Programming half the people who are writing about it are thinking in different idioms than the one they're actually using, which does not improve matters. Every now and again you catch them out when you see the hoops they jump through to make the system perform to their expectations, but you need to already understand a lot of stuff before you can spot it.

For me, the most useful book was one on programming patterns - high-level abstracts that told me something about the toolbox of my chosen language (Objective C). After a year of intense reading and engagement I am just starting to see simple solutions to problems and to develop a feel for implementations. Very often I want to do things as I would have implemented them in Filemaker, which is a completely different idiom, but I am starting to think Objective C. It's cool when that happens!