Posted on: January 30th, 2011 by Daniel No Comments I think this week I really got to think­ing about how long it’s been since I was a) in col­lege and b) in school for com­puter sci­ence. The last time I really spent any brain­power on C or Java pro­gram­ming was almost 11 years ago. That would explain the learn­ing curve I’ve expe­ri­enced over the last few weeks trying to catch up not only with C and Objective-C, but also OOP in gen­eral (or at least OOP as far as Obj-C and Xcode go). The good news is there are so many great resources out there to catch you up, assum­ing you have even a base knowl­edge of C (and even pro­gram­ming in gen­eral). Here’s a list of some of the places I’ve been focus­ing on: Craig Hockenberry’s book, iPhone App Devel­op­ment: the Miss­ing Manual has been an indis­pens­able primer into the thought process that goes into set­ting up Xcode, cre­at­ing all of the objects and meth­ods needed to process some of the data I’m look­ing to work with, and the most effi­cient way to manage memory.

I’m about 3/4 the way through this book so far and while it’s not super advanced, that’s not what I’m look­ing for just yet anyway. The iBook­Store has a hand­ful of great ref­er­ences in ePub format on sub­jects such as an overview of Objective-C, an overview of OOP in gen­eral, UI guide­lines, etc. All are fairly quick reads but being in a format that can easily be read on any iOS device I own is a def­i­nite plus.

iTunes U videos. Stan­ford has offered up their 101 course on iPhone appli­ca­tion devel­op­ment on iTunes U. It assumes you have a base knowl­edge of C and OOP which I do in vary­ing degrees, so it’s been really neat to just sit down with the Apple TV and learn the basics of iOS development. Prag­matic Pro­gram­mer screen­casts.

I learned Expres­sio­nEngine a few years ago in part to Ryan Irelan’s excel­lent screen­cast series, and I’ve gone back for their series on Objective-C. Apple Devel­oper docs. As I’ve started going through the motions of wire­fram­ing, making fea­ture lists, and think­ing of every­thing I’m going to be work­ing through, all of those “…how do i do x…” ques­tions get answered by the excel­lent Apple Devel­oper doc­u­men­ta­tion. I haven’t gotten into any of the screen­casts that are offered here, but I imag­ine that might happen at some point in the near future.

Pro­gram­ming in Objective-C has been where I finally landed when I real­ized that my knowl­edge of C wasn’t going to be enough to really get my very far. While the base knowl­edge was nice, this exhaus­tive book assumes you have very little knowl­edge of any­thing other than C and takes you from start to finish in cre­at­ing basic Obj-C code all the way to get­ting you into Xcode. Com­pletely rec­om­mended for anyone from novice to advanced.

It’s been about 2 weeks since I really started think­ing about whether or not I wanted to spend the time to learn how to develop mobile apps, and I’m already pretty famil­iar with the basics and have writ­ten a few proof-of-concept apps. I’m hoping that by the time I blow through all of the resources listed above, I’ll be well on my way. Wel­come!

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