I keep getting questions about how to best get into coding apps for the iPhone. Do I recommend books? How should one go about this?
I have one recommendation: Only steel good stuff. Download all the samples you can find on the Apple site and look them through. For most of the basic tasks you can find code to steal there, well commented.
But most importantly I recommend you get a mentor. Somebody who is slightly ahead of you in the objC programming game. But not too far ahead to feel annoyed by your questions… 😉
And that’s the last recommendation: learn to ask the right questions. Because if you ask the right questions you will find that …
40% get answered by Apple documentation
40% get answered by Google: somebody has answered the question in his blog or in a forum
15% get answered by somebody more experienced than you directly if you ask
4% you have to discover for yourself … and then hopefully you document your discovery on your blog
1% are bugs that you have discovered by accident 🙂 Those you please submit to Apple for them to fix.
When I got started with coding objC for iPhone there was next to no useful literature. And now that I have written half a dozen apps and managed to get 4 into the store I don’t think I would ever need a book. Once you know how to read and understand objC code there is nothing really that you need for reference except the sources I mentioned above.
One more thing: try to develop a network of friends who all are sharing coding for iPhone as the same hobby. Of 10 questions I asked in various forums I only got around 3-5 answered usefully. If you remember the SDK 3.0 presentation, you know that more than half of current iPhone developers are new to the platform! So you are in the same boat as most of us. Be strong! Don’t give up!
Categories: Q&A
