About Objects class part 1 - Complete

I finished up part 1 of the About Objects ( http://www.aboutobjects.com ) class on Friday and am hoping to take part 2 in July.

For the most part is was terrific. I learned a ton of stuff about C that I didn't know (or thought I knew, but I was wrong) and the teacher was really good at conveying everything in a clear manner. Plus, he was a pretty cool dude.

The one thing I was a little disappointed in was that all day Thursday was a review of the things we learned Monday through Wednesday. This is because we had a few new people show up on Thursday that were there for the start of the Objective-C course, which follows the ANSI C one. Also, it was because a TON of information was presented through the ANSI C course and was therefore reviewed to the folks in the class that just went through it.

Unfortunately, this only left one day for Objective-C training. I know that the point is to lead the Obj-C into the following week (part 2) of the training course. So I'm sure for everyone that was staying for part 2 it was a great thing to have as a review. For me, though, I would have quite preferred two solid days of Obj-C. That's no fault to the About Objects folks. If I could have stayed the second week I'm sure I'd have a different view on things. :)

Regardless, the day of Obj-C that I did get taught me a number of nifty little bits. For example, one thing I was unaware of was what the NS stood for at the beginning of all the foundation class stuff. So, NSArray, NSObject, NSString, etc. In case you don't know, NS = NeXTStep. This is because OS X is really a descendant of the NeXTStep OS. Now that may not seem like it's all that helpful to know, but when you're coming from a Windows background and you're seeing all this weird Objective-C stuff (NSObject and the like), it's a bit confusing.

Also, the syntax of Obj-C is weird. To me anyway.

NSString *desc = [[NSString alloc] initWithFormat:@"Class: %@, Name: %@", [self class], @"Test"];

That looked really strange to me when I first saw it, but now I'm getting the hang of it.

Anyone interested in learning this stuff should consider About Objects. They were very nice and extremely helpful the entire way.

Other good things that I've picked up since have been a couple of iPad books (that were free!). They are:

• The Objective-C Programming Language
• Object-Oriented Programming in Objective-C

Both of them are available on the AppStore, again, for free.

Learning iOS Development at About Objects

Since Monday I've been at a training seminar to start getting iOS development under my belt. I've played around with Flash CS5 to make pointless little apps that go through the Adobe porting process and spit out iOS code. I've also tried a few different 3rd-party tools to get a handle on how things work. But it just wasn't enough to really get a grip on things.

I just finished up a lab and we're on a 10 minute break, so here is a quick blip about the class.

So AOL hooked me up with a training course at a company called About Objects ( http://www.aboutobjects.com ). It's in Reston, Virginia, located in the downtown area (called Reston Town Center). The area is very nice and there are a lot of restaurants and shops right here. The point is that you don't have to worry about where you're going to eat lunch or pick up supplies, etc. There's even an Apple store a block away in the event that you need something to support your learning.

Of all the companies out there that I could find doing OS X/iOS development training, About Objects was the only one that had ANSI C. Thus, the first class in the series is ANSI C on OS X. While I've coded numerous apps in C since the late 80's, I haven't done anything in C for about 10 years. Plus, I've not done anything really deep on the Mac or iOS platforms, so starting out with a lower level language like C seemed to be a smart move. As the instructor (Jonathan Lehr, owner of About Objects) points out, it's better to get a solid understand of what's going on under the hood before you start working with the higher Objective-C language. I couldn't agree more. After spending a month banging my head on Objective-C, I finally gave up and just considered it a lesson that I needed to stick with the Windows environment. This is because I couldn't seem to find anything that really helped me get to an area that I was comfortable *before* going into an area I'm not.

Things are moving quickly in this class, but in a good way. As an example, this is supposed to be a "learning C" course. On day 2 we were working with pointers. Today we move into structs, function pointers, etc. But, to me, this is the way to learn. Get a fast dump of relevant information, skip all the crap that you're not really going after, do a number of labs to help the knowledge sink in, sleep on it, and move on to the next section. I've gotten more out of two days on C than I probably did in the years I was coding in C. Jonathan conveys the information clearly and his level of knowledge about the language and OS make for numerous tidbits that have made me say, "Oh...cool" numerous times.

Now keep in mind that the point of this ANSI C class is not so that you walk out knowing all there is about C. The point is that you have a solid understanding of C's strengths, quirks, and weaknesses. This is because day 4 is the start of learning Objective-C and in order to understand why Obj-C does things as it does, understanding its base component (C) is very valuable. I sure hope so because I'm hoping to finally understand Obj-C by the end of this week!