Teaching iPhone course next semester

December 9, 2009
Author: Brad Larson
ios
Teaching iPhone course next semester

For those of you in the Madison, WI area, I thought I'd let you know about a course that I will be teaching next semester called Advanced iPhone Applications Development. The course will take place Wednesday nights at the Madison Area Technical College (MATC).

The class will be held Wednesday nights from 5:30 PM - 9:20 PM, starting January 13, in Room 192A at the MATC Truax campus. The room is very nice, with half of the seats having newer iMacs running Xcode and the iPhone SDK. MATC is also a member of the iPhone Developer University Program, with all the access that brings.

This course will focus on what I feel are the important areas of the Cocoa Touch frameworks, once you've familiarized yourself with Objective-C and the basics of iPhone development. For each framework, I'll introduce the core concepts, present practical examples of that framework in action, and then point out what I believe are the most useful elements of the framework. Each framework could be a course in itself, so I will highlight many resources for further research beyond the class.

At least a half hour in each class will be devoted to answering any questions students might have as they are developing applications, whether or not they are related to the topics that day. Consider this to be time where I'm your unpaid consultant.

The curriculum that I have planned, which will probably change as I get feedback from the students, looks something like this:

  • Introduction / Design of iPhone applications
  • Objective-C tips and tricks
  • Debugging
  • Views and controllers
  • Quartz 2-D drawing
  • Core Animation
  • Core Data
  • MapKit / Core Location
  • OpenGL ES
  • Peer-to-peer networking
  • Incorporating web content within your application
  • Scroll views and custom multitouch event handling
  • Playing audio and video
  • Unit testing
  • Multithreading
  • Performance analysis: memory
  • Performance analysis: CPU usage, startup time

As of right now, there are 10 seats still open in the class, so I'd register soon if you want to get in.

I apologize for things being quiet on the application front lately. My latest update for Pi Cubed has been taking far longer than I anticipated, so I haven't been able to get much else out. Hopefully, I should be finishing up that update soon.

UPDATE (6/3/2010): The videos for this class are now available on iTunes U.