Besieging Cocoa

Usually when I want to learn a computer language or development environment, I attack it head-on. I just start making something so complex and difficult that I have no business making it using an environment I don’t know. The results is frustration at first, but then conquest. By the end of the project I usually know the language better than most. Then shortly after I become an expert.
But not so with Cocoa. I don’t even know if that is what to call it. Objective C? Xcode? Mac programming? Whatever.
Many times over the last few years I have sent expeditionary forces into Cocoa for small projects. I get the projects done, but with no real understanding of how the Xcode environment and Objective C really work. To make things worse, Xcode seems to change quite a bit just about every year.
Those changes sure are frustrating. And they are made worse because each one renders a ton of examples obsolete. Someone comes up with the definitive example of how to do X in Cocoa, and then a year later that example is almost unusable because Xcode has changed so much that the example no longer works.
So I’ve slowly been surrounding Xcode and Cocoa with small projects. First it was a simple iOS app or two, and now a Mac app. I’m just chipping away at it, learning more and more.