As a personal endeavor I’m trying to make an iOS app. Making a native app for iOS has been on my to-do list for at least 2-3 years but I could never figure out the Objective C language and I haven’t done a lot of object-oriented programming. With newfound determination I have been trying to learn this stuff when I have downtime at work. I’ve had a lot of downtime lately so my learning progress has been good!

Things I’ve been skimming through:

Stanford undergraduate course on iOS through iTunes U (Not Recommended)

I started off trying to learn iOS by following Stanford University courseware via iTunes U. I thought “hey, Stanford is a great school. This should inspire me.” Big mistake — I despised computer science lectures when I was in college 10 years ago and evidently I still hate them. The first few lectures were long-winded and impractical for the purposes of building a simple app.

Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2012)

Big Nerd Ranch guide proved useful for understanding some fundamentals of Objective C. It’s densely written and some of the chapters are difficult to parse in my head. This is slightly easier to deal with than a boring iTunes U lecture but it has heavy reliance on extending code in preceding chapters so you cannot jump around from chapter-to-chapter to pick what you need. I would prefer a just-in-time piecemeal approach.

Beginning iOS 6 Development (Apress, Jan 2013)

This book is written more simply than Big Nerd Ranch. I ran through the first few chapters and finally understood the workflow of using XCode to create the UI by linking buttons to actions and code. Understanding XCode was a major breakthrough for me. The first handful of chapters are useful because the examples are step-by-step and do not depend heavily on using code from previous examples.

Apple’s documentation (horrible)

Large swaths of Apple’s iOS documentation and example code is outdated. However, I slogged through some of the examples to help understand some of the components that are not discussed in the other 2 books.

Various web tutorials

As you would expect this day in age, there are tons of video tutorials on the web, YouTube and other content authors who blog about learning iOS on their own. These are often helpful. The problem with these tutorials is that many of them are for older versions of XCode and iOS. Working with iOS has apparently changed quite substantially over the years because the code samples can often look completely different from modern stuff. I’m sure the recent release of iOS 7 makes this truer than ever.

Stack Overflow

Whenever I run into  issues Stack Overflow has the answer 97% of the time. Long live SO!

Make a media player – http://www.codigator.com/tutorials/how-to-make-a-custom-ios-music-player/