Paul Hegarty's updated CS193p SwiftUI course released by Stanford | Hacker News Reader

Paul Hegarty's updated CS193p SwiftUI course released by Stanford

cs193p.stanford.edu

201 pointsyehiaabdelm40 comments

I took CS193P when it was first offered in 2007; one of my favorite classes at Stanford because it was so hands-on. At the time few people had iPhones, so everyone in the class got a free iPod Touch for development. My final project was a photo sharing app with a Polaroid shake to reveal mechanic… lightly influenced Instagram which Kevin and I built a few years later!

You built a solid app!

If you were a student in 2025, is CS193P (looks swiftUI rendering heavy) still the hands-on foundation for the next-big-tinkerer or would it look more like building around affordances of AI? (or something else).

Wow. Thank you for your service

Yeah. Instagram was lovely. It might be disheartening to see what it became, what it does to people's minds for a profit, the costs for society as a whole.

I can't seem to find the 2007 webpage (maybe it was one of the wiki-based ones?) but the 2008 syllabus looked very hands on: https://web.archive.org/web/20081208171743/http://stanford.e...

I never took 193p, but I always found 148 to be hands on, and I made it very hands on for the year I contributed: https://web.archive.org/web/20130522184434/https://graphics.... .

I regret that we put my subdivision assignment as the last one, and we allowed students to skip one assignment. Most students skipped it, but those that did the work thought it was super cool to have their own subdivision tool for making smooth meshes.

how did course exist in 2007 ? App Store and sdk was released in 2008

ah you’re right, I was off by one! 2008 was the year.

Love the throwbacks.

I wasted a few minutes earlier today trying to find the original website for the Cocoa class that Tristan helped set up a few years before this one got started.

God I love Hacker News.

This course was integral in kicking off my career over a decade ago. I think there's no better way to learn to build an iOS app, and the fact that it's free is a true gift. Pre-reqs are in the first lecture:

-Experience writing code (100% of the work in this course involves programming) -At least CS106A (Programming Methodology) + CS106B or X (Programming Abstractions) and CS107 (Computer Organization & Systems); CS108 (Object Oriented Programming), CS43 (Functional Programming Abstractions), CS11O (Principles of Computer Systems), CS147 (Introduction to Human Computer Interaction Design) are awesome! -Know some "structured" programming paradigm, e.g. OOP or Functional Programming -Preferably you know more than one language (cause you're gonna learn a new one here!)

This was my first learning experience with iOS around late 2012. Watched all the lovely videos and did the homeworks just to learn, and eventually went on to write lots of probably horrible working code for early Tinder. At least we had a QA team that rocked back then.

Thanks Paul! Could not have asked for a better intro to working with Objective-C at the time. The fact that this is free and everyone can learn with it is awesome!

I love cs193p! Paul Hegarty is an incredible teacher. I did the course twice [1], first in 2020 as a programming noob who just threw everything into one file. His teaching of MVVM was my first introduction to proper software architecture. Then I went through it again last year as a refresher before building my first app and even on the second run, his lectures were fun to listen to.

[1] https://github.com/sk-ruban/CS193p

Very cool! Thanks for sharing this.

Not sure if I'll do it, myself, because I think I may have already gotten past it, but that's been a long, painful slog. Wish I had this resource a few years ago.

I did the 2014 version of this to learn Swift to port an Android app I made.

He’s an excellent teacher!

I think he worked at Apple so he shared a lot of the history behind the APIs in iOS going back to the NextStep days.

This is the course I used online to learn Objective-C and UIKit to make iOS applications, and now I am a Staff iOS Engineer. Nice to see him still doing this.

Excellent course (I did mine ~2019), super grateful to Paul and Stanford for continuously releasing it publicly and updating them all these years later.

What a fantastic resource this has been over the years. Hegarty is a real old NeXT guy too!

I'm thankful these are given away for free, but a little sad all the videos are only in 720p

Why did they cancel the Android alternative of this course?

Wow man been waiting for this to be updated for ages!

This is a lovely surprise. Fantastic resource.

I am surprised that a university with the renown of Stanford would have a course specifically on "the fundamentals of how to build applications for iPhone and iPad using SwiftUI." Not even mobile UI/UX, or UI/UX principles in general; straight up yolo iOS.

How do people not find this absolutely egregious?

At my uni, we organized protests for much smaller intrusions of corporate interests into education.

Is Stanford not much better than a bootcamp these days?

> Is Stanford not much better than a bootcamp these days?

Rage-bait?

Universities are criticized for not providing enough economic value and real job training, yet when they do, they are labeled corporate shills.

No? It was a legitimate question because there have been similar trends in other unis around the world, and I am not personally acquainted with Stanford things. I always held Stanford in high regard.

There was no Android, app store was new, there were no app bootcamps. In 2025 if you wanted to offer a hands-on quantum computing class for Computer Science (not Physics), you'd need to pick a corporate product.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com