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!
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!
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