Teaching iPhone course next semester

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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.

Comments

you should video record these classes like Stanford did with theirs. Would greatly help the iPhone SDK learner community.

Currently, we are planning to record and release the video via iTunes U. We probably will not be posting videos as quickly as Stanford did, but they should be out a few months after the start of the class.

The class videos are now available on iTunes U.

Hello Brad,
I couldn't help but to notice your molecule app on App Store. My organization is planning to develop some Medical/Bio apps some time in the future. Would love to collaborate and exchange some ideas if you're interested.

-Gaurav
Co-Founder
SystemsBioInsight
www.SystemsBioInsight.com (website still in the works).

I'm grateful that the advanced iphone course is on iTunes; but it makes reference to a basic / introductory class on iphone sdk; indeed there is a link:

Class #10152143 --
http://programs.matcmadison.edu/programs/iphone-application-development/...

Do you know where the video content or course material for that is?

Thanks.

That class is more hands-on, so we don't record it. Also, there aren't the kind of prepared materials for that course that there are for this one.

In any case, there are plenty of getting-started resources out there, such as Stanford's iPhone class, so I don't think you'll be lacking for material.

FYI, the University of Utah iPhone videos helped me a whole lot more than the Stanford videos. Stanford videos showed code snippets, but didn't go into detail enough, it left holes in my knowledge base.

I've watched the Lynda.com iPhone essentials, rwth-aachen, Stanford (both semesters), University of Utah, UC Davis, and I'm doing the 1st semester of your videos now.

I have to say your videos and the University of Utah videos are for me the best source of information so far. I would like to see more code writing in your future classes though. When I see you make a mistake or go though the process of finding the information on how to do something it's a real learning experience, that is similar to what I might do in real life.

I wanted to say thanks for making this information publicly available on itunesU, it's made a world of difference for me, and countless others.

-Brad

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