An aspiring iOS developer faces three basic hurdles:
- You must learn the Objective-C language. Objective-C is a small and simple extension to the C language. After the first four chapters of this book, you will have a working knowledge of Objective-C.
- You must master the big ideas. These include things like memory management techniques, delegation, archiving, and the proper use of view controllers. The big ideas take a few days to understand. When you reach the halfway point of this book, you will understand these big ideas.
- You must master the frameworks. The eventual goal is to know how to use every method of every class in every framework in iOS. This is a project for a lifetime: there are over 3000 methods and more than 200 classes available in iOS. To make things even worse, Apple adds new classes and new methods with every release of iOS. In this book, you will be introduced to each of the subsystems that make up the iOS SDK, but we will not study each one deeply. Instead, our goal is get you to the point where you can search and understand Apple’s reference documentation.
We have used this material many times at our iOS Development Bootcamp at Big Nerd Ranch. It is well-tested and has helped hundreds of people become iOS application developers. We sincerely hope that it proves useful to you.
This book assumes that you are already motivated to learn to write iOS apps. We won’t spend any time convincing you that the iPhone, the iPad, and the iPod touch are compelling pieces of technology.
We also assume that you know the C programming language and something about object-oriented programming. If this is not true, you should probably start with an introductory book on C and Objective-C, such as Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide.