Confessions of an Xcode scaredy cat

Before we proceed with this series of Xcode for iOS posts, I want to make clear the motivation behind them. Something that I'll be doing here as a stop gap between last week's post and the next one.

First and foremost, it is important to point out that I am not putting myself forward as an expert in programming Xcode for iOS. I am instead someone interested in becoming more proficient in coding for the platform.

The motivation behind the "Xcode from scratch for scaredy cats" series, therefore, is somewhat self-centred, because in constructing the posts I am forcing myself to think in clear terms about the writing of code for iOS, and become better. But there is another reason as well, and that is because I wanted to help people like me who needed a foothold to start climbing the Xcode mountain.

Although there are many excellent sites and tutorials for learning Xcode, as a beginner I all too often found that a long time was spent on explaining the user interface before there was a quick and massive leap to writing a full-scale app (or more commonly explaining all the things you could do wrong when writing a full-scale app).

I needed a bit more hand-holding, a bit more explaining about the simple things, and to be given something I could quickly identify how to change and manipulate.

But rather than learn first and teach later, and in the interim forget my path to understanding, I decided to record these sample pieces of code as I created them, so that I provided the dolly steps required by beginners written in the process of beginning.

I didn't begin completely unguided. I did read the majority of Programming iOS 4 by Matt Neuburg and some of the iOS 4 Programming Cookbook by Vandad Nahavandipoor before I started these posts. I also began watching Paul Hegarty's amazing lectures at Stanford on iTunes U (2010 and 2011), and continue to do so. 

I'd recommend you watch Hegarty's lectures too. (He worked for NeXT Computer with Steve Jobs and has 20 yrs experience in programming the language that fed into OS X and led to iOS. He really knows his stuff!)

I'd also recommend you read the books from O'Reilly on programming iOS (you can buy iOS 4 versions already, but with so many changes I'd recommend you wait if you can until the iOS 5 versions hit the shelf.)

These lectures and books will teach you in-depth about getters and setters, memory management, gestures, graphics and so on. I'm just here for the leg-up, the foothold to get you started. And hopefully you'll continue to read the posts in this vein.