Stanford Offers iPhone App Development Course Free on iTunes U

Wednesday November 16, 2011 10:40 am PST by Jordan Golson

Stanford University is offering the iOS 5 edition of its well-regarded iPhone and iPad application development course free on iTunes U.

Instructor Paul Hegarty attributes the course popularity to the appeal of Apple products and the instant gratification of creating apps for mobile devices. "There's something about developing for the iOS platform that's really exciting and fun because it runs on devices that everybody has in their purses or pockets, " he said.

"There aren't a lot of courses you can take that when you get to the end, to your final project, you can take it out of your pocket and show your friends."

Hegarty said that his students develop a wide array of applications for the iPhone and iPad, including many that improve or automate their daily lives. Those include apps that manage laboratory experiments, keep track of food choices at campus eateries, or access the works of Shakespeare. Games and social networking applications are also popular.

The offering includes the same course lectures and slides that Stanford students experience, but without the Stanford credit or access to instructors. Still, for burgeoning developers, iTunes U is an excellent opportunity to get world-class instruction for free.

The university notes that the two Stanford prerequisite courses, Programming Methodology [Link] and Programming Abstractions [Link], are also available on iTunes U.

iPhone Application Development is available free on iTunes [Link].

Top Rated Comments

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jakesteramma

Posted: 32 months ago

Awesome resource. The one's in the past have been a bit fast paced for my experience level which is a beginner. But it is indeed excellent and I keep coming back to it as I learn more.

Thanks to Apple and the Universities for such an wonderful learning experience!!!!

:D

Rating: 1 Positives

goodfellaNW

Posted: 32 months ago

Very true (the last was Fall 2010) but the Fall 2010 was outdated rather quickly because of XCode releases. It's nice to finally have an updated lecture and hopefully this utilizes the latest and greatest!

The Stanford lecture is by far the best out of all iOS lectures available on iTunes U.

This lecture was there years ago. And they update it every year. Awesome stuff (although I only followed for 4 lectures before working on my own project).

Rating: 1 Positives

AustinZ

Posted: 32 months ago

The class isn't over; there are still lectures that have been yet to be delivered and filmed. Others are in the post-production pipeline.

Rating: 1 Positives

4np

Posted: 32 months ago

I'm following it as well... I was following last year's course, but I find this years' iOS 5 course more suitable as it's become more easy for non-C developers to understand. For example, due to ARC (automatic reference counting) the whole retain/release mess is overboard and memory management is more or less out of the way. Which means you can focus more on the 'how' and the functionality than on boilerplate code. Also this course seems to focus on the dot notation from the start, while in previous year(s) it was more focussed on how it was supposed to go, how that changed over the years, and how you're supposed to do it now. This year's course is focussed on how it is supposed to do now (e.g. from the start the dot notation, synthesizing properties, etc), and how one was supposed to do it before is pretty much out of scope of the course. I find this year's course a more hands-on experience and practical while the previous ones were more theoretical.

The whole idea of designing the view, hooking it up to code through outlets and actions is really quite elegant. The syntax is the bit to get used to, but due to the dot notation that becomes more easy to follow.

If you have a history in OO-programming and are familiar with the MVC design pattern, you will find this course is quite easy to follow.

In my opinion the best iOS course out there... Must see if you want to head into iOS development... Especially as it covers the iOS 5 SDK and Xcode 4 very well (a lot of new API's were introduced, and Xcode 4 has changed quite dramatically compare to the previous iterations). And what better a teacher than one who actually helped set up Objective-C at NeXT at the very beginning? :)

There's not as many videos as Fall 2010 for some reason

The course started at the end of september and is still underway...

But according to what I read, not for beginning developers. You must know C++ already or have a good foundation on it.

It might indeed be a bit hard to grasp if you do not understand basic OO programming, as it it constantly referring to Class, Object, Instance, Inheritance, Introspection, etcetera. If you do not have the basic OO-knowledge this is gonna be a tough cookie... But, any OO will do... C++ definitely not a requirement...

Rating: 1 Positives

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