Your First iOS App | Hacker News Reader

Your First iOS App

indiegogo.com

71 pointsAshFurrow22 comments

As someone who has always wanted to learn Objective-C but has never been able to find up-to-date and easy to understand tutorials on building an app, this is something I can get behind.

Agreed! What defines easy and up to date to you? How would you like the book to be laid out?

Check out the "iOS apprentice" tutorials. I think they cost about $30, but it walks you through building 4 non-trivial apps with full source code. It also targets iOS 5 and 6, so most of the cool new features (automatic memory management anyone?) are covered.

Stanford University have been running a very good course for a few years now, and it's freely available on iTunes[1]

I'd also recommend the free tutorials[2] and the more in depth ebooks[3] at Ray Wenderlich's site (the content is far better than the site's design would have you believe).

Whatever you learn, make sure it covers iOS6 and is ARC based, the older tutorials are very dated and will only confuse.

Now, if someone could point me in the direction of some really good Android tutorials…

[1]http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/

[2]http://www.raywenderlich.com/tutorials

[3]http://www.raywenderlich.com/store

http://nsscreencast.com is a good resource. Much of it is paid - $9/month, but there's a lot of good free stuff too.

It's basically a Railscasts ripoff (and I mean that in the best way - I'm a paid subscriber to both).

What's special about this is the use of GitHub. That has so much potential to improve the learning process. I hope the author will look beyond mere hosting of his sample code to actually showing how to use GitHub to tap a vast community of real working projects to learn from and use.

In fact I bet if you reworked it as "Learning iOS Using GitHub" and pitched it to a publisher they might bite.

When I was first learning Cocoa/CocoaTouch I found it hard to jump from the books I was studying to my own apps. Creating a TabBarViewController, fine. Retrieving location, simple. Creating views and sub-views, there are 100's of tutorials and books with step-by-step code examples. However, when it came time to bring all those pieces together into a real app there was (and still is) a huge gap in available resources.

App architecture, memory utilization, debugging/unit testing and code style are areas that I'd love to have Ash cover.

This is great - teaching intro level stuff is hard

I just backed your project. Good Luck !! This is simply amazing and the timing for this project is just perfect as I am trying to learn Obj-C and will later on focus my complete attention to the iOS development.

Great initiave, i've always wanted a book like that.

Could be cool; I don't know programming but I would love to be able to make some finance apps that no one has seemed to produce thus far.

Glad to see some books coming from the community!

Cool, how do you see this comparing to CS193p?

Personally, my first attempt to learn iOS development was with CS193p by Stanford University, I was really confused all they way and saw it as something kind of difficult. I almost gave up, but afterwards bought an iOS Programming Guide by Big Nerd Ranch and I felt the opposite.

Maybe the pace of the Stanford videos was too fast for me or I'm just not smart enough, but it didn't work in my case. Several months later, and after building several iPhone apps, I gave CS193p another chance, and it was very insightful. I already knew most of the things explained, but it felt like if I was taking and advance course and were completely comfortable with it.

CS193p is very valuable to begin with iOS development, but maybe not for everyone. Hands-on, self paced courses with clearly explained code examples are my favorite ones and worked for me.

The last course (winter 2013) is IMHO a bit too lightweight, it avoids going deeper into some stuff that was touched in earlier courses. I dont's use storyboards so that's another minus for me, because everything is storyboards based. In any case this is solid course and highly recommended.

As for books the two I'd highly recommend would be the already mentioned "IOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide"[1] and "Programming iOS 5" [2].

Ray's tutorials are also worth checking out.

[1] http://www.bignerdranch.com/book/ios_programming_the_big_ner... [2] http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920023562.do

It's going to be similar in terms of audience, but less focused on in-depth understanding of each framework and more focused on practical, hands-on learning. I'm a firm believer in experiential learning – I'd rather have someone learn about the NSString class organically through using it than have a chapter devoted to it.

I am curious why you ran this on Indiegogo and not on Kickstarter? What are the pros and cons of Indiegogo vs Kickstarter?

I wanted to run on Kickstarter originally, but I'm Canadian and they don't allow us to campaign there yet.

wanted to contribute, filled out the form, and couldn't find a 'continue' button.

$5000 for "another" programming book?

Those who teach, can't.

No, $9 for another programming book. Which is a steal, frankly.

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