Scott Lberknight from near infinity participated to Big Nerd Ranch’s iPhone Bootcamp training event. Scott relates every day of the class, what they have been taught, the various topics covered, the exercices, and his own thoughts on iPhone development and the Cocoa Touch APIs.
Tags: training
ZDNet columnist Ed Burnette has been developping on Android so far, but has decided to take a 5-day class on iPhone development. Day after day, he blogs about his impressions on what he learned through the class, and contrasts this with Android development. So far, he’s been through the three first days, but he’ll write two other articles for the remaining days. Here’s what he’s written already:
Stay tuned for the other articles!
Update: Here are now the remaining days.
In the right side bar, your perhaps noticed I had added a del.icio.us section. I’m listing there all the links I collect related to the Objective-C language, the Cocoa and Cocoa Touch framework, and the iPhone in general.
You can even subscribe to my CocoaPods del.icio.us RSS feed (it’s a bundle of the ‘iphone’, ‘cocoa’ and ‘objective-c’ tags).
If you’ve got some interesting links to share, don’t hesitate to push them here, so that I can reference them afterwards.
Although Objective-C 2 introduced garbage collection, if you’re developing on the iPhone with Cocoa Touch, you’ll still forced to use manual memory management. So you have to be very careful to handle memory properly, to avoid any memory leak, or application crashes.
I’ve stumbled upon two interesting articles which cover this important topic of memory management:
- A Java Programmer’s Introduction to Objective-C: Memory management
- Very simple rules for memory management in Objective-C
Tags: memorymanagement
Stanford, one of the most famous American universities, is releasing its iPhone development class for free, as reported my MobileOrchad. CS193P covers everything, from Objective-C, to the foundation classes of Cocoa, up to iPhone development. Of particular interest, the Objective-C PDF from lecture 2 will give you a great introduction to the language.
Let’s review the lectures available:
- Lecture 1: Introduction
- Lecture 2: Objective-C and Foundation framework
- Lecture 3: Custom classes and properties
- Lecture 4: Application lifecycle and MVC
- Lecture 5: Views and animations
- Lecture 6: More views, defaults, auto-release
- Lecture 7: iPhone application design and view controllers
- Lecture 8: Navigation and tab bar controllers
- Lecture 9: Table views
- Lecture 10: Dealing with data
- Lecture 11: Performance
- Lecture 12: Text input, presenting content modally
The lectures come with assignments and code samples, so it’s a great way to start learning and experimenting. I just wished they’d publish online videos as well, that would be a nice addition to this great resource.
Since the iPhone NDA has been lifted, bloggers are starting to publish some nice resources for learning iPhone development. For instance, the Cocoa is my girlfriend blog has published a nice Cocoa Touch tutorial. Not only that, but they also created a nice screencast going through this tutorial.
Become an Xcoder
We are going to see lots of tutorials flourishing all over the internet covering iPhone development, Objective-C and Cocoa learning. There are as well interesting books on Cocoa, Xcode, Objective-C, that you may read to become a Ninja developer. I’ve selected a few books but that I haven’t read yet.
- Become an Xcoder: You may start with this one, as it’s a free and recent PDF on Cocoa / Objective-C development using the Xcode IDE
- The pragmatic programmers provide three books in beta mode: iPhone SDK Development, Core Animation, and perhaps the best one to start with: Cocoa Programming: A Quick-Start Guide for Developers.
- I’ve also heard good words about the very recent 3rd edition of Cocoa Programming for MacOS X.
As you may all probably, so far, the iPhone SDK was under Non-Disclosure Agreement. You had to sign this NDA to get access to the SDK and to use it, which meant that nobody could speak or ask questions about the development of iPhone applications. In the blogosphere, there was even an aggregator linking at posts and tweets from people complaining about that situation.
Fortunately, things are changing, and Apple has just announced that they were in the process of completely dropping that NDA.
In a message to iPhone developers, here’s what Apple said:
We have decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement (NDA) for released iPhone software.
We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.
However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software. Developers will receive a new agreement without an NDA covering released software within a week or so. Please note that unreleased software and features will remain under NDA until they are released.
Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.
So now, books can be published about iPhone development, conferences can take place, and training events can happen as well. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to speak freely about iPhone development on this blog as I’m learning along.
The title says it all, welcome to Cocoa Pods, the blog where you’ll learn about Objective-C and Cocoa programming for MacOS X and the iPhone. I’m myself a beginner in these technologies, and I want to share whatever I learn along the way. I’ve got a strong Java background, so certain aspects of the upcoming articles may be viewed from that perspective.
If you want to learn more about the motives of this blog, please visit our about page.