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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
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? :)
The course started at the end of september and is still underway...
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...
The Stanford lecture is by far the best out of all iOS lectures available on iTunes U.
Thanks to Apple and the Universities for such an wonderful learning experience!!!!
:D