Gadget Techie

When deciding how to go about learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch for the iPhone, I came up with various methods. My first method was to read online tutorials from various sites. I soon learned that this was not the way to go. Most tutorials are quick and dirty and as such don’t really go in depth into what it is that each line of code does or why you are using the code you are using. Instead, they just ask you to blindly type in the code and hit Build and Run.

The second method involved following the iPhone Development course offered by Stanford for free (you can find them on iTunes and at the Stanford website). I watched about 4 lectures and completed the first homework without a problem. However, once it came time to complete the second homework I realized that, while this Stanford course was A LOT better than the online tutorials, it was still not a good way for a complete beginner in Objective-C and iPhone development to learn. The course assumes you know more than a complete beginner would know and does not explain things in as much detail as I would like (typical of all college courses). Therefore, I decided I needed to find a source that would not assume I had any knowledge in Objective-C or iPhone development.

Enter the third method: books. I resorted to buying books from Amazon (after checking them out at my local bookstore of course). I bought three books:

• Programming in Objective-C 2.0 by Stephen G. Kochan
• Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass
• Beginning iPhone 3 Development by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche

I plan on reading those three books in that order. The first book (Programming in Objective-C 2.0) is the only book I could find that assumes you know nothing. So far it has been amazing! I am on Chapter 8 and have done all the exercises at the end of each chapter. The author of the book has created a forum where readers can post their answers, ask questions, and even post new projects and such. It is a VERY useful resource and so far I have posted all the answers to all the exercises from chapters 2-7 on there. I will see if I can find a way to neatly post the code in this blog.

The second book (Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X) is said to be the “Bible” of Cocoa programming.

The third book (Beginning iPhone 3 Development) was the only book on iPhone development that was up to date with the new 3.0 software.

By reading these books and completing the exercises, I strongly believe that I will have a good foundation on which to build iPhone apps in the future. Also, once I finish the first book, I will continue following the Stanford lectures in parallel to reading the other two books.