Best products from r/iOSProgramming

You can dive right into Objective C, I was only vaguely familiar with C and I've published a few apps without any problems. However, if you're intent on learning C pick up 'The C Programming Language' (K&R), not only the best C programming book, but one of the best programming books ever written.

Objective C books, I recommend one of the two or both books,
'Programming in Objective C 3rd edition' or
'Objective C: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide'

Both of these books are excellent resources for learning and I keep them close by whenever I have a question.

In terms of learning iOS development. I recommend going into iTunes U and downloading the latest Stanford University iPhone development course. I believe Winter 10 is the newest, follow along those classes and the class website, treat it like a real class, do the homework and all the assignments. There is no text book for the class, but this other book by Big Nerd Ranch, 'iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Way' is totally awesome.

After these classes and books you should have a great foundation for iOS development. Once you feel comfortable with everything and have an app or two under your belt, download Madison Technical College's Advanced iPhone Development course videos from iTunes U and Apple's own WWDC Session Videos.

Each MTC video is about 3 hours, watch them in chunks. The professor, Brad Larson is one of the best iPhone developers out there and in my opinion is one the best contributors to the community, (see his posts on stack overflow).

Lastly, check out www.raywenderlich.com. My personal favorite iPhone development website. It's updated every Monday, Wednesday, Friday with great technical tutorials that are funny and educational.

Best of luck to you and welcome to iOS development :-D.

I got my first iPhone back in 7th grade (iPhone 3G), and fell in love with it. I loved downloading lots and lots of apps from the App Store (which had just been released), and was impressed by how creative many of them were.

Shortly after, I began to want to make my own apps. I had 0 programming experience, but thankfully my parents believed in me, and bought me a MacBook Pro to develop with (also for school work), and then I bought myself a book teaching the basics of iOS development (it was this book, but for iOS 2: https://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iOS-Development-Exploring-SDK/dp/1430236051). I followed the tutorials in the book, made some sample apps, and soon thought I knew enough to make my own apps, so I stopped.

Turns out, although I did technically know enough to go by, there was still plenty I didn't know. Thankfully, by working on my own apps, I was able to fill in the many gaps in my knowledge, and spent the next several years just refining my skills.

Years later, I came across an outdated code base for a Game Boy Advance emulator for iPhones, so I spent several months tinkering with it and getting it to work. This gave way to my most successful project by far, GBA4iOS, a GBA and GBC emulator that could be installed outside the App Store (http://gba4iosapp.com).

Now, I'm working on a new app, Delta, which will emulate SNES, GBA, GBC, and N64 games (http://deltaemulator.com). It's been a long road getting here, but by just continuing to work on my own apps I was passionate about, I was able to refine my skills and get better and better :)

tl;dr; got iPhone 3G, fell in love with it, bought a tutorial book on making iPhone apps, worked on several of my own apps for years, released GBA4iOS, working on Delta now!

I am a java developer and took a course on iOS coding when I was getting my CS degree, but haven't touched it since graduation. 3 months ago I decided I wanted to get back in to it and maybe make a career change. I knew a lot has changed so I wanted to start from the beginning. After looking around for a bit on where to start, I went with the Big Nerd Ranch iOS Programming book, Amazon link. This was an awesome place to start. The book flows well and it really builds on itself. Their online forums is a great resource when you get stuck, there was always at least one person that had encountered any problem I ran in to and had already posted about it along with a solution. After I was finished with the book I started going through the Ray Wenderlich tutorials and they have helped a ton, especially after gaining a great understanding through the BNR book. In a relatively short time I have a great understanding of iOS and am just building on it by making up my own side projects with various features to the app and then sitting down and figuring out how to implement these features. Best of luck to you!

K750 was great, but it died once I moved to a darker office...

Apple Mini Keyboard is okay-ish, but the best and not-that-expensive I found so far is 2017 Anker Ultra Compact Slim Profile Wireless Bluetooth Keyboard (long name) https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00PIMIUPW/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1&pldnSite=1

It does not have backlight, but typing feels great on this thing. Much better than the MacBook keyboards old or new and battery life is great. Best part is that it charges via USB, so no need to replace batteries like Apple keyboard.

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Okay. Depending on what parts of the framework "very simple" involves, and with the stipulation that you're building a prototype that you can pretty up later, I think it's possible, given your background.

Go get the Big Nerd Ranch book for iOS Programming:

http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Edition-Guides/dp/0321821521

Get it in a store or rush ship it. Don't bother trying to go through the whole book—in a week or whatever—like the one guy suggested. If you were in an immersion course at the Big Nerd Ranch, with dynamic, experienced instructors, and a room full of motivated fellow students, I'm sure you could more or less touch on all of it in a week. But that's not your situation. Just concentrate on the intro to Objective-C. Then, look to see what parts apply to you.

In the meantime, watch the first few episodes at the University of California, Berkeley that they have on iTunes about iPhone programming. Don't watch them all. If there are one or two past the first couple of intros that directly apply to your app, watch those.

The Ray Wenderlich are good tutorials, as someone else suggested.

Google the shit out of anything on StackOverflow that applies to your app.

Finally, if you can reveal anything about the structure of your app, without, of course, giving away this million dollar idea (I'm giving you a hard time, just for fun, so go with it!), tell us. We can give you better answers as to what to look for.

Best of luck!

2008-2009: Took 3 High school level Computer Engineer/Science courses and studied Assembly Language Robotics (This is where I really took up an interest in programming)

2010-2012: Attended Humber College (Toronto, Ontario, Canada) for a multimedia course that mainly focussed on web development.

2011-2013: While still in school and for a bit afterwards I worked at a company that did AS3 based facebook games and then ported them over to iPad using Objective-C (This is where I was transitioned over to iOS programming)

2013-Now: I've worked at many companies in different roles from junior->lead.

My learning basically was from trial and error, and not from being scared to just jump into large projects. You really shouldn't because it could put you off but I was in the state of mind that this is my career and I love learning new things so one of my first major personal projects was an RPG game engine made from scratch for iOS. It didn't use ARC, IB, or any 3rd party frameworks (When I was first taught Objective-C I was told this is how it should be so I continued down that road). I was very proud of what I was able to accomplish as such a Junior developer. I did go onto making more apps, for example: Sky and being on development teams, for example: BNN GO.

Books: Programming-Objective-C-6th & C-Programming-Language-2nd are the two books I read when starting out and sometimes reference or read them still.

Future: I hope to teach myself to be more patient as a developer and not jump the gun on features being "prematurely" completed or bugs being fixed. I believe this is a problem a lot of developers suffer from and could be seen as ADD-Developers if you will. I would like to crack down on this personally because I find myself shifting towards more of a lower level, application architecture role and will need to be more sure of my code as it would hold together the application in a sense.

Neat. My first gilding! To add to the comment below I highly recommend NSScreencast. Weekly short videos tackling iOS development. Not much in the way of testing but some good Swift things. In fact there are a few free episodes on Swift if you'd like to try it out.

Test driven iOS development is a good book - but I don't know how useful it'll be for you as its a little old now and focuses on Obj C.

PM me if you have any questions, and don't be afraid to ask on StackOverflow - we all do it!

I can't think of any 'modern' books, I bought one a long time ago called 'tapworthy' but that was like 6 or 7 years ago
https://www.amazon.com/Tapworthy-Designing-Great-iPhone-Apps/dp/1449381650

I read it a long time ago, but honestly, nothing really stand out off hand as to how good it was. I was new to iPhones back then and was reading anything :D

There's sites, but I can't remember them off the top of the head. Most talk about colors usage and screen layout. It's kinda like looking at all the new "latest-n-greatest" web/mobile stuff.

I did this back when it was only like $150
https://www.udemy.com/the-complete-ios-7-course-learn-by-building-14-apps/?dtcode=zVm6tx21l7ow

Vea Software - simple and easy projects
http://www.veasoftware.com/tutorials/

Chris Ching - great guy
http://codewithchris.com/

The Bible
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Objective-C-Edition-Developers-Library/dp/0321967607

And, if you get stuck, come back here and ask questions or message me! It's a great skill and fun to do as well.

Ray Wenderlich's site has great tutorials. I'd strongly encourage you to work through these books - they should give you a pretty strong foundation:

• Programming in Objective-C - this will also give you a primer/background in C language features as well.
  
  
• BNR's Objective-C Programming - great overview of the language
  
  
• BNR's iOS Programming
  
  Ray Wenderlich also has some Swift tutorials but if you are just starting out I'd focus more on Objective-C for now as it will be very useful to know when looking at libraries that aren't ported to Swift.
  

I really enjoyed 52 Specific Ways to Improve Your iOS and OS X Programs. Lots of great tips on using the language (and Cocoa) most efficiently, and designing better API.

Some suggestions:

WWDC sessions. Even the Mac ones.

The Mobile Application Hacker's Handbook
Has a lot of useful information about security, privacy, and reverse engineering.

XCode 5 Developer Reference

While this was written for Xcode 5, much of it still applies to Xcode 7. It includes information on build configuration files, using breakpoints to trigger scripts and other subjects/techniques that are difficult to find elsewhere.

Test Driven iOS Development

The book is OK, the author did a video series for ideveloper.tv that was much better and more accessible. Unfortunately it is no longer available.


If you get a 1 month Safari Books trial you can access a lot of content easily (I think all of the ones I listed, and more). Some of them may be available for free (well, parts of them) through Google Books.

You can also look through iOS developer conference videos online. Some will help you level up, some not so much.

https://vimeo.com/nsconf

https://vimeo.com/360conferences

https://vimeo.com/channels/nsscotland2014

https://realm.io/altconf/

Use these ebooks. They're brilliant:

First: Learn some Objective-C
Second: Start with iOS

It's very important that you don't give up when learning to write software. Keep chiseling at it and you will be able to create amazing apps.

I'm currently working through the Big Nerd Ranch books which are fantastic. They have such a good way of teaching - you are constantly writing code and there are a lot of challenges for you to complete at the end of chapters. I picked them up after recommendations from many other redditors.

They have two books:

• Objective-C Programming - for those with no previous Objective-C experience.
  
• iOS Programming - for those who have worked through the above book &or those who already have a good understanding of Obj-C.
  
  I started with the first (as I would suggest you do) and would definitely recommend both.

I recently learned about it myself but haven't had a chance to implement it yet.

Could I ask what your hash ended up looking like?

I've been reading through Effective Objective-C. I'm about 25% through it and have already picked up a few handy things. I definitely recommend it!

Swift:

• The Swift programming Language https://swift.org/documentation/TheSwiftProgrammingLanguage(Swift3.1).epub
  
• Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide https://www.bignerdranch.com/books/swift-programming/
  
• iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide https://www.bignerdranch.com/books/ios-programming/
  
• Advanced Swift https://www.objc.io/books/advanced-swift/
  
• Functional Swift https://www.objc.io/books/functional-swift/
  
  
  Objective-C
  
  
• Objective-C Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide https://www.bignerdranch.com/books/objective-c-programming/
  
• Learning Objective-C 2.0 https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Objective-C-2-0-Hands-Developers/dp/0321711386
  
• Effective Objective-C 2.0 Effective Objective-C 2.0: 52 Specific Ways to Improve ... - Amazon.com
  
• Programming in Objective-C https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Objective-C-6th-Developers-Library/dp/0321967607
  
• Programming with Objective-C https://developer.apple.com/library/prerelease/content/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ProgrammingWithObjectiveC/Introduction/Introduction.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40011210

Great book about common Cocoa design patterns: http://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Design-Patterns-Erik-Buck/dp/0321535022

Does a great job of explaining delegation, among other things.

I've got started on iOS programming 3.5 years ago reading the Kochan Objective-C book (probably the 3rd edition).

I am (was) an experienced programmer and found Kochan very helpful, specially on the memory management side of it. Learning C came after that, when I needed to do something that required more performance on iOS.

I also read part of Hillegass Cocoa book because I had it at hand, which got me a good starting point to learn Cocoa Touch online.

NSUSerDefaults is meant to be used with strings, booleans and NSData representation of other data (serialised). I believe you serialise your class to be stored into UserDefaults which is fine.

When I started developing on the iPodTouch2G, I had issues storing and retrieving data more than a few hundred kilobytes. I took some months to understand the basics of CoreData (I never wanted to use raw SQLite, which is an option). Even today I have not mastered it because mastering core data can only happen with time and experience. I still don't like the way CoreData calls from multiple threads and the merge mechanisms but that is the way of life :)

Sooner than later your dataset will grow and you will be hard pressed for options. I suggest you start with simpler architecture (One entity with one property) and scale up the learning process.

This is a comprehensive guide to learning core data and mastering it ;) Core Data: Data Storage and Management for iOS, OS X, and iCloud (Pragmatic Programmers)! from one of the masters of core data.

I spent a lot of time learning specific architectures and patterns that were in common usage when I first started, but the specific patterns in vogue are constantly changing. I'd recommend reading all 3 of these books at some point earlier in your career, I think a lot of the popular software design practices are based on the foundation of ideas in here and if you read them you will start to naturally make the right choices when it comes to organizing your code.

https://www.amazon.com/Pragmatic-Programmer-journey-mastery-Anniversary/dp/0135957052/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_0/142-3028760-3243861?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0135957052&pd_rd_r=8877e123-b48f-4ce7-9e92-fec38cbeb54f&pd_rd_w=CdI3a&pd_rd_wg=arKVG&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D&psc=1&refRID=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D

https://www.amazon.com/Code-Complete-Practical-Handbook-Construction/dp/0735619670/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_2/142-3028760-3243861?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0735619670&pd_rd_r=8877e123-b48f-4ce7-9e92-fec38cbeb54f&pd_rd_w=CdI3a&pd_rd_wg=arKVG&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D&psc=1&refRID=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D

https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882/ref=pd_sbs_14_t_1/142-3028760-3243861?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0132350882&pd_rd_r=8877e123-b48f-4ce7-9e92-fec38cbeb54f&pd_rd_w=CdI3a&pd_rd_wg=arKVG&pf_rd_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf_rd_r=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D&psc=1&refRID=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D

1. You should learn Objective-C. Start with Learning Objective-C from the Developer site, and follow the rabbit trail to other documents. Also, read up on iOS Application Design
   
   
2. Yes. You can register your app to be woken up in case of a significant location change. Or, you can register your app for continuous location updates in the background, which will kill the user's battery if not used correctly. See Executing Code in the Background.
   
3. It may be easier for you to pick up Cocoa programming on the Mac before going to the iPhone. Pick up Aaron Hillegass's excellent Cocoa Programming for Mac OSX and read the first five chapters. (I noticed that Hillegass has produced a new iPhone Programming textbook. I haven't read it but it has good reviews).

Pointers

In all seriousness, others have mentioned great resources. I found the Big Nerd Ranch Book to be a great resource. From zero Objective-C knowledge to developing.

I recommend Erica Sadun's book, Auto Layout Demystified. For $15, you'll get a lot more information than Apple's documentation as well as some useful examples.

Agreed. I also recommend K&R, it is a short but effective introduction to C, written by the makers of C themselves.

It gets harder and harder as time goes on because a lot of the new books, editions and tutorials are converting to Swift.

Two of my favorite books for Objective-C are Stephen Kochan's Programming in Objective-C Sixth Edition and Big Nerd Ranch's Objective-C Programming.

Unless you're a voracious learner, I probably wouldn't read through the whole book but instead just use it for reference while also continuing your training in Swift. As someone else mentioned in this thread, most of your Objective-C work will probably be bug fixes or interacting with some Objective-C frameworks like RestKit. That means you'll have a plethora of codebase to look at and learn from.

iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (4th Edition) (Big Nerd Ranch Guides)

https://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Guide-Guides/dp/0321942051/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1485464571&sr=8-7&keywords=ios+programming

It seemed like a good option and great ratings

The book Programming in Objective-C is pretty good, and focuses on the language itself rather than SDKs.

Apple's own guide to Objective-C isn't awful. If you need some quick comparisons between Objective-C and Swift, I wrote up a bunch of equivalent code snippets a while back. You may also find the following useful:

• Big Nerd Ranch's Objective-C intro
  
• Ray Wenderlich
  
• NSHipster and objc.io are both good for picking up patterns
  

Just jump straight into Objective-C, in my opinion.

I started out by reading this and then got into iOS development from there.

Whatever your decide on learning, my advice is to just push yourself with crazy projects. Your project will require a fairly decent understanding of Obj-C and iOS development, so I'd start by reading that book and then find some cool apps to work on to sharpen your skills.

Once I had read that book, I read around for a while and created an iOS implementation of Pong. That was such a learning experience as it really brought together a lot of skills I had been learning as well as forcing me to learn a whole load of new, incredibly important skills.


TL;DR: Just learn Objective-C first, C might be a bit too 'scary'.

>https://www.amazon.com/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmanship/dp/0132350882/ref=pd\_sbs\_14\_t\_1/142-3028760-3243861?\_encoding=UTF8&pd\_rd\_i=0132350882&pd\_rd\_r=8877e123-b48f-4ce7-9e92-fec38cbeb54f&pd\_rd\_w=CdI3a&pd\_rd\_wg=arKVG&pf\_rd\_p=5cfcfe89-300f-47d2-b1ad-a4e27203a02a&pf\_rd\_r=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D&psc=1&refRID=9JQWC8NFNAY0GN7FAN9D

Thank you, which of those do you recommend to start with?

Grapefruit books seemed to be the best to me:

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iOS-Development-Exploring-SDK/dp/1430236051

Stephen Kochan’s Programming in Objective-C is great for learning.

Big Nerd Ranch has a pretty good OS X book. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0134076958?keywords=big%20nerd%20ranch%20os%20x&qid=1452094223&ref_=sr_1_1&sr=8-1

Also the iOS equivalent are bibles for OS X and iOS developers.

Can't go wrong with the Big Nerd Ranch. That'll get you going on obj-c and a simple starter app. Their iOS specific book is great if you don't mind translating some of the out of date stuff.

Typically iOS devs at their level of polish are using core data to store information about the app entities. This is a object graph system that maps to disk, the web, a database, or really anything else.

Marcus Zarra wrote an excellent book on doing this.

To get the numbers, they then do fetches from the object store, then count things. Count things by days, or by type, etc.

Thank you for your kind words and suggestions. For anyone looking into Big Nerd Ranch's iOS book, I would like to point out that they have yet to update it as it's for Xcode 8, Swift 3, and iOS 10.

I liked this book, read it when Swift was still under development.

A lot of people have had success with the book I write for the company I work for:

iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (6th edition)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0134682335/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_XL35Ab39GGVNW

We also have a Swift book:

Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (2nd Edition)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/013461061X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_NM35AbQ45T962

If you have questions about either, let me know.

I found this: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Auto-Layout-Demystified-Mobile-Programming-ebook/dp/B00C68XS0S to be a useful explanation.

I've also been using auto layout in code using https://github.com/floriankugler/FLKAutoLayout which makes it much less verbose and readable

tapworthy is a good one, also apple's Human Interface Guidelines

I found the grapefruit books helpful, you may or may not. For whatever it takes to get a safari subscription, you can use those books, rather than buying some you may or may not like... My $0.02

Read Programming in Objective-C. It will teach you the Objective-C language while teaching you enough C so that you know what you're doing. I highly recommend it.

I first learned by reading the Big Nerd Ranch Guide to iOS Programming. The usual warning applies, that physical books are out of date by the time they are published, but it is a good starting point.

If you can wait 10 more days, iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (3rd Edition) will be released. This is the one I'm waiting for. It will be covering iOS 5.1 and Xcode 4.3.

Here's a review
of the original book.

Note that even though the Amazon page says April 1, one of its co-authors has confirmed on Twitter that it will be available starting March 23.

The Big Nerd Ranch Guides for Objective C and iOS Programming are just about the best books for absolute beginners, I've found. I had programming experience in Java and Android apps prior to working on iOS, but read the two books anyway (online tutorials are the faster way to go) just to see if I could pick up something in-depth, and I did.

http://www.amazon.com/Objective-C-Programming-Ranch-Edition-Guides/dp/032194206X/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1408323435&sr=8-3&keywords=big+nerd+ranch+ios

http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Edition-Guides/dp/0321942051/ref=sr_sp-atf_title_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1408323435&sr=8-1&keywords=big+nerd+ranch+ios

There really isn't a difference for iOS except for your UI layout. iOS will also have more file restrictions as well.


But, that same group does have a Mac series: https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Programming-OS-Ranch-Guides/dp/0134076958

I've also been trying to 'level up' my iOS dev skills, and cannot recommend Effective Objective-C 2.0 enough, as well as Cocoa Design Patterns.

Something else I've been doing is making my way through the Apple Programming Guides and sample code, and I've learned a lot just from that.

Started with some Udemy course that was on a 95% discount.

Bought an iOS book after.

Although the Big Nerd Ranch books aren't for sale in my country everybody seems to favor them.

http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Edition-Guides/dp/0321942051

https://www.amazon.com/Cocoa-Design-Patterns-Erik-Buck/dp/0321535022

I'm considering starting off with this and then moving onto this book

Last year I was using the second edition of this book - http://www.amazon.com/iOS-Programming-Ranch-Edition-Guides/dp/0321942051/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1413908253&sr=8-1&keywords=big+nerd+ranch

But for whatever reason it wouldn't work on Xcode 5 and I didn't care so much about buying the newest book, check out their forums to see if the 4th edition has any issues with Xcode 6.

My best advice is to avoid "It's easy to write an app" tutorials. They put you in way over your head and when there's something wrong with the tutorial (or you mistype something) you flounder.


Instead focus on "the basics" of programming. For loops. If statements. Basic control flow. Variable assignment.

Next focus on understanding Object Oriented Programming. It'll take a while to wrap your head around it, but it's the foundation of everything Apple provides you to write apps.

For these two steps I used this book but you might want to find something based on Swift, since that's the new hip thing.

Then you start learning Apple's frameworks. Do a bunch of tutorials. Write your own app. When you realize it sucks and you'd be embarrassed to share it with anyone dump it and start over. Write lots of apps that do stupid little things. Make them bigger. After a few times you may have something cool, but more importantly you'll have learned a bunch of stuff you can't learn by doing tutorials.

Try to remember when it's late at night and you're crying with your head down on the desk because you can't get it to work that programming is fun. (That's sarcasm, but you need to know that even expert programmers went through it too. If you keep plugging you'll get better.)