tl;dr: Email course + a live session Q&A to teach you how to build a simple iOS app that fetches gists from the GitHub API and displays them in a table view. JSON + networking + showing results in UI.
Sign up by May 4.
One of the authors here, AMA.
Sign up by May 4.
One of the authors here, AMA.
P.S. This has got to be somewhat challenging to do while living on a boat.
Coding on a boat has it's ups and downs. I'm in an area with decent LTE now so it's not so bad. Having a partner for this course helps a lot.
Good luck!
Now, for building RESTful JSON apps, it's actually not hard at all. Your two friends in this are:
NSJSONSerialization NSURLSession
Apple has made a lot of progress in his area and, from my experience, where people go wrong is using some other library to handle these tasks. Granted, other libraties are there because someone saw an opportunity to 'simplify' things, but more times than not, they're abused and misused.
My advice, get to know the above classes and separae your your networking and model de/serializing into other parts of your app architecture. Do not shove all this oun a view controller!
Think about clean separation and you'll benefit later down the road. I've built about a dozen json api's and iOS app counterparts and this approach has always worked well.
Good luck!