Free course on developing iPad applications from CMU's HCI institute
cmu.edu
cmu.edu
http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/
http://itunes.apple.com/itunes-u/ipad-iphone-application-dev...
I'm "taking" it right now, so I should get back to work instead of reading HN :) I like it so far. If you have prior experience with object-oriented programming, it is a good resource. The basics are enough; understanding the concepts of classes, methods, etc.
"The main difference comes from the focus on data visualization. Roughly 1/4 of the lectures discuss core concepts and best practices for designing apps to let users visualize and interact with different types of data. The other 3/4 of the course is about iOS programming. Although much of this will overlap with the Stanford course, the added focus on data changes some of the iOS topics that are emphasized. For example, we talk about maps and core location very early on in the course, since the first assignments have to do with visualizing data on a map. -----"
The Apple "new improved textbooks and courses" thing suffers from the same problem, I had a look at one (on geometry and trig) and things were out of sequence.
If you are none of the above, your best bet might be to get a Windows license and pop up a virtual machine with ritual ox.
Check out the book by Stephen G. Kochan
The caveat of course, is that Cocoa (an Objective-C API used for making interfaces) is very Mac/iOS specific.
So you may not be able to write Cocoa code on Windows/Linux even of you download... (it might be) OpenStep?
But your gcc should compile Objective-C sans Cocoa.
As for XCode, like most Apple side-projects it tends to gather dust in darkness, until one day they come in and change everything around, just because they can. In 2007 it was pretty good if you wanted a stripped down lean and mean coding IDE which still had access to a lot of features.
Contrast that to the Java IDEs of the time which seemed to be saying "FEATURES! WE HAVE FEATURES! GET YER FEATURES HERE! Never mind about that coding crap, have you seen our FEATURES!!!???".
Eclipse was a particular offender, cramming your interface so full of buttons and tabs and tabs of tabs and templates of tabs of tabs and views of tabs, and buttons that the actual coding area on a normal monitor was like unto a postage stamp. (It got better, but vestiges of the feature-mindset-disease remain)
Anyway, I'm less impressed with the current version of XCode than I was with the one from 5 years ago.
Primary attractions of Objective-C
Memory management Message passing (which is what all those square braces are about) Long method names which increase readability at the expense of not being able to remember what the heck the function you wanted to call is named so you have to keep referring back to the documentation Did I mention the squirrelly syntax?
From a pattern point of view they use the delegate pattern a lot, e.g. The Window handles the Windowy stuff, but for those things you are most likely to want to customise it passes them to its delegate.
That way you 'never' need to actually subclass anything, you just plug delegates in everywhere.
I never had anything large enough on XCode for it to actually matter enough to me to get it working though.
I remember when I was in my teens having a great deal of interest in things and not being able to get access to materials-- the tiny university in my town had a library that was a goldmine for me, but in retrospect was very small. I remember often having to wait weeks or months to get specialized knowledge that I knew was out there but that wasn't readily available.
This course is great news. I'm a longtime iOS developer, but have to have my head in the server side of things so much that I appreciate these courses as a refresher.
Also coming to appreciate the iTunes U App. I just downloaded Stanford's Machine Learning course in the format last night. (This is the same course that was given for free last year, same instructor, but the one in iTunes U's new course format is from 2008, not sure why.)
Love having the homework and being able to check things off so I can keep track of how much of the course I've completed.
Of course, as we can see from the Philosophy of Science courses, that philosophy is actually more important than science, because philosophy is more meta.
That is to say, without philosophy you wouldn't know which approaches to doing science were better than others.
To solve that, you'd need to invent a "science of science", or a "science of thinking about science", or a "science of knowing stuff"...
...at which point you're simply reinventing the epistemological wheel as it were.
Also, universities teach art, medicine and architecture, all of which (or so I've been told) have some marginal redeeming value.