When I was 11, my aunt gave me the perfect present: a book to learn how to program in Basic. I was hooked. Years later, I taught myself PHP, got some Pascal and C at school and sniffed up some Javascript on the road. The fact that I had quite a lot of programming experience, and wasn’t able to develop Apps for my beloved iPhone really frustrated me …
So, I bought some highly recommended books, but non of them really got me going or were able to keep my attention. Online tutorials were fun, but in most cases I was just copy-pasting code, and give me no clue what I was doing.
Until one day, I found the Stanford iTunes U course by Paul Hegarty. This course was exactly what I needed and I enjoyed every second of it.
Without a doubt I can say Paul Hegarty is absolutely the best teacher I’ve ever had. And that’s pretty impressive, since I’ve only took his virtual lessons.
Now, the reason I’m telling this, is because Paul Hegarty’s new course has just hit iTunes U: “Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift”.
Updated for iOS 8 and Swift. Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms using the iOS SDK. User interface design for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multi-touch technologies. Object-oriented design using model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, Swift programming language. Other topics include: animation, mobile device power management, multi-threading, networking and performance considerations.
So, if you’re interested in becoming an awesome iOS developer: fire up iTunes, download XCode, grab some drinks and get going!
A few words of advice that really helped me during my learning sessions:
- Watch the full episodes. Don’t skip forward. Just relax and take you time.
- Complete every assignment, even the bonus assignments, before you continue with the next lesson. Although there is no one who will grade your work, it will definitely help you to fully understand what the video taught you.
- Don’t skip lessons. I know it’s tempting to skip to the lessons you think are more interesting, but I promise you that it will only scare you.
- Don’t copy/paste code. Do you own assignments. If you’re using someone else’s code. You’re doing it wrong.
- And most of all: Enjoy! I still get a smile on my face when I watch some Paul Hagerty video’s.
If this gets you in iOS development, keep me posted on you progress! And feel free to let me know when you need some help.