This is the link a friend sent me. It claims 4 weeks to learn iPhone Development without prior experience. Any recommendations as to whether this works or something else that does?
For $150 I'd suggest the Hillegass book and a membership to the dev center. The downside to most learning materials out now is that they are all using XCode3, so the illustrated examples can be confusing to a beginner. There is a lot of new stuff in iOS5, so the dev membership is essential for the WWDC videos alone.
Not sure this video is worthwhile. You can watch the latest Stanford iOS class on iTunes U for free.
That said, the idea behind the video you linked to is not a bad one. The problem with iTunes U courses like the one I mentioned is that they are not optimized for web viewing. 40-60% of each video is useless because it's class administration or the instructor is a poor speaker. The stuff on the whiteboard is usually unreadable. The lighting is bad, nobody cares about seeing the instructor up there talking. A video with the same content but with professional voice over, no time wasted, four dozen "ums" edited out, crisp information on the screen and up to date walkthroughs of stuff in IB and XCode4 would be worth a lot more than $150. However, $150 is a lot to pay for content you don't really know anything about.
If you have any programming experience at all, this is not worth it. It does Hello World, then walks you through several examples that are a nice introduction to iOS development. It does as advertised though - you can develop iOS apps in 4 weeks - they don't do much though. The final app has a clown fish that moves on the screen and changes direction when tapped - I think.
Once you get over the Objective-C and Cocoa nuances/syntax, then it is just another programming language. Learning about all of the libraries is what you need to do if you want to produce an application. I searched the net for reviews of books and found an iPhone dev cookbook to be more helpful (Erica Sadun I think - don't have it with me). It is a little dated because XCode4 is now out, but the libraries it references are core to building any app that does something.
Setting aside time and having the right resources are key. I suggest a book or two. I breezed through the linked course content in a few nights.
I started helping a friend two weeks ago. Goal was to develop an app that supports push notifications, audio analysis through FFTs, GPS tracking + plotting, and very basic peer to peer stuff through Bonjour.
Step one was to download XCode 4 (VERY impressive piece of software btw). Then I read and implemented http://bit.ly/hrB2Ku. I've gone back and read that doc about 20 times now - Apple terms delegates weirdly (I came from C#; where delegate drive events, not inheritance)
Then I checked out http://bit.ly/o4DTTs and was yet again very impressed! Apple provides a basic hello world to each one of its frameworks (Now I finally understood the big deal with iOS-BlackBerry dev tools).
Biggest roadblock with me was Objective C syntax and its dynamic nature, but that I picked up through PDFs at http://bit.ly/gLYZUV - didn't have patience for long videos.
Although Google is a huge help (duh!), most of the stuff there is for older SDKs. I'm learning iOS4 stuff mostly through Apple Docs and Sample Code. Articles at http://bit.ly/mBa1zT are also excellent in terms of quality.
Finally - WOW! iOS is a pleasure to develop for. The hardest part is app design, SDK literally takes care of all implementation ! I'm not even completely finished my current project and I already have some ideas for my next app!
All that said, iOS coding still isn't intuitive to me. That should come with practice - another 2 months I would think.
The apple guides are really good and there are so many free examples. Also Standford has a great series I used after I got started, if you have any prior programming experience it will get you up to speed fast.
That said, buying books didn't really work for me. The way I learned was buying work from developers, and then hacking it to pieces with the help of online guides, books, and videos from Think Vitamin and PeepCode.
Another trick I used was paying freelancers to build apps, and then as part of the job requirement, asking them to record a video of them writing certain pieces of code, and explaining how I can change things on my own. Worked well.
Surely you know the "hacker ethic" as much as the rest of us, but the very fact that you posted this indicates that you might need a refresher course. Here goes: Sure you can learn iPhone programming. Just sit down in front of Xcode and figure it out. But in four weeks, on somebody else's schedule? Highly unlikely.
Thanks for the tip Allen