The Long Weekend Website

Resources For Learning iPhone Programming

By Ross on July 28th, 2010 in Technobabble
Tags: Books, development, iOS, iPhone

I’ve been developing for the iOS SDK for over a year now, and I thought I’d share some of my favorite resources that helped me learn. I started developing for the iPhone from a web development background. I had no previous experience with Cocoa or Objective-C so these resources are a great start for anyone.

First and most obvious: the docs. You should get comfortable reading the API documentation as soon as possible, it’s where I spend the most time when looking to do something new.

Second, there are a few blogs and forums that seem to have consistently good code available. My favorites are:

Cocoa With Love – I think this is the best! He knows his stuff and passionate about Cocoa.
Stack Overflow – Really shouldn’t need any introduction at this point.
iPhoneDevSDK – Often has other people with similar problems. The quality of the code varies greatly here, so use it for inspiration and finding the right path, not as gospel.

Update:
Not to toot our own horn, but we’ve developed quite a few how-to articles on our own blog, here’s a list: iOS Development Articles

I also used several books which I recommend:

Cocoa Design Patterns (kindle version) – This is the book I still find myself reading. It gives you the background to really understand what is going on like why delegates are so useful (and common) and why obj-c uses [object alloc] init]. If you want to get really good with the SDK, not just copy and paste code snippets, read this book.

iPhone Games Projects (kindle version) – Yes, they are talking about games, but nearly all of the content in this book is applicable in any kind of app. I also find that iPhone apps need to be a little “game-y” to be successful anyway, so this is a good resource. I actually like the whole Apress series, but they tend to overlap quite a bit and I like this book the best. It isn’t as hardcore, but talks about many aspects of iPhone programming like building binaries well and making sure you keep your .dsym’s so you can symbolicate crashes later.

iOS 5 Developer’s Cookbook (kindle version) – I actually read the earlier version (for SDK 2.1) but that will be too out of date to be much use now. The links are for more recent editions. I liked that there was a lot of sample code and it was formulated as “I want to do X” style. This was the first book we read, and it helped us a lot in the early days, but I haven’t felt the need to pick it up lately.

All these books can get heavy, and don’t really fit the location independent lifestyle we are building at Long Weekend. For that reason, we are also fans of the Kindle. You can also use the Kindle app on the iPad or iPhone.

These are the resouces that got me through the first year and into developing great apps and I think they can be an aid to you as well.

You may also be interested in business books for startups.