blog.benwong.me

I’ve found myself with some spare time in the past couple of weeks, so I decided to start learning iPhone app development. After a couple of weeks I’m really getting into it and I thought I should document my experiences.

The first thing I did to get myself started was to buy a book to learn from. There are lots of book out on iPhone development now so it can be daunting to pick one out. I decided to grab iPhone for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach. Deitel books have always had a good reputation and I like the example driven approach.

I worked through about half of the book and I realised I wasn’t really learning anything very well because I started to just type the code into XCode and not understand what it actually did. I tried analysing the code and instructions to understand it better, but it wasn’t clear enough and it was making me drowsy.

So, I started reading the documentation on Apple’s iPhone developer website and watching the Stanford iPhone Application Development videos on iTuneU. They’re both really good resources. I highly recommend both. They give you a much better understanding of the fundamentals of the Objective-C language and the iPhone SDK.

At this stage I’m getting fairly comfortable with Objective-C and creating a basic iPhone app with multiple views. I haven’t registered for the iPhone developer Program yet, but will probably do that in the next week. In that time, I should also have a good grasp of using the Map Kit.