iPhone Development 101

iPhone 101

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This tutorial was written for Xcode 3.2; it's outdated now. For a more up-to-date tutorial, check out Apple's App Development Tutorial to learn how to write iOS apps. There are also lots of other excellent books and online tutorials you can learn from.

If you'd like to find out when the updated version of this class is ready, follow me on twitter:

So, you have an idea for an iPhone app, and want to write it yourself? Great! This site will help you get started.

The best way to learn is by working through lots of examples. The more experience you get writing code, the easier it'll be to spot similarities. After the fourth or fifth time you've coded a text field or a table view, you'll be able to say "ah! I've done this before", and know what to do.

Don't try to memorize everything. You can't - there's far too much to remember. You're better off learning:

  • key concepts. If you understand how something works, it'll be easier to code it.
  • where to find help. Xcode comes with complete documentation for the iPhone. Rather than trying to remember every detail about a particular class, you'll be better off remembering where to find the class help document, and how to read it.

iPhone programming is a complex topic; it's not for beginning programmers. If you've never done any programming before, you might want to start with the book Programming in Objective-C 2.0.

This isn't a complete course in iPhone development; it's just a quick start at writing apps. If you want to go beyond this material (or you already know this stuff), there are many excellent books out now that can help you.

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