Mellow Machines

After you register for an iPhone developer account, Apple presents you with lots of beautiful documentation. In fact, it’s almost TOO much documentation for someone who doesn’t know where to start. After much wandering around, I pieced together a better roadmap for building up my iPhone knowledge. This might not be the best approach, so let me know if you have any feedback or suggestions.

1) If you’re a visual thinker like me, you might want to spend a few seconds looking at the Application Life Cycle and Event-Handling diagrams in the iPhone Application Programming Guide. These diagrams illustrate the sequence of events as an application starts, responds to user input, and then shuts down. Seeing this diagram was a relief to me after trying to piece together concepts from other sources. This took around 15 minutes.

2) Read the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide first, especially “The Cocoa Environment“,  “The Cocoa Frameworks“, and “The Model-View-Controller Design Pattern” chapters, to prepare some mental categories of code you’re going to see later. It’ll give you a frame of reference when you see classes with different prefixes like “NS”, “CG”, and “UI”. Skip any Mac-specific parts unsupported by the iPhone, such as Core Data. This guide took me around 2 days to study carefully, but you might skim it quickly in an afternoon.

3) By the way, I made the mistake of reading the entire “Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language” reference manual from beginning to end, which is why this blog post is titled “day 2″. The summary in the Cocoa Fundamentals Guide is much shorter and more relevant to getting started.

4) Skim the iPhone Development Guide to get some hands-on familiarity building basic apps in XCode, even if you’re not sure how everything works yet. Explore sample source code with tips in Step 3.

5) Learn how to turn XCode into a learning environment with code sense, Research Assistant, and instant shortcuts to documentation. I’ll blog more about this approach later.

My strategy is to build a mental model of the language and frameworks as a whole first. It gives me a way to piece things together in my head so that I know where to look for information later, but this does require more patience in the beginning.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 12th, 2009 at 8:54 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.