iPhone Application Programming Kickoff

Hello World!
That’s it. After 15 years of diverse programming and software management experience, I’ve decided to find a new challenge and start iPhone programming from scratch.
My main motivations are:
- Embark on this rapidly growing business which is to sell iPhone applications
- Use my creativity to come up with new applications which haven’t been thought of yet (hopefully, there are still some left )
- Spend more time coding and less time managing. I do both in my current day job but I feel the need to immerse myself deeply in a new technology and become an expert at it.
iPhone programming is pretty hot right now, so I think that sharing my experience and learnings in a blog may help others achieve similar goals.

Learning process
People have different preferences to learn new technology. For me, I need to have hands on experience quickly while learning the fundamentals of the technology. After comparing books on Amazon, I came up with a great book called:
“Head First iPhone Development”
It’s not my first book from the head first edition (I went through HTML/XHTML, Java and Object Oriented Programming books before). What I like about these books is that they give u a way to create small projects quickly while gradually introducing more complex concepts at the same time. This is again the case for this iPhone book which lets you build simple iPhone projects while teaching you what you need to know about Objective-C, Cocoa Touch framework and programming design patterns.

The first prerequisite for this book to have done some programming, especially object oriented programming. If you’re completely new to it, then the book will be overwhelming quickly. If that’s the case for you, this book: Head First Object Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) can help you with Object Oriented concepts.
The second prerequisite is to have a mac. Apple has its own IDE (Integrated Development Environment) called XCode which only runs on Macs. So if you’re serious about iPhone Apps programming, then there is no other than going to your closest Apple store and getting yourself a Mac.
Getting an iPhone/iPod Touch is actually not necessary on day 1 but will be required for future testing. The whole head first book can actually be done using the simulator that runs on mac too.
Once you’re have a device and want to deploy your new project on it, you’ll need to sign up for the iPhone Developer Program which is $99 per year. If you don’t have an iPhone yet and don’t want to buy one, you can still deploy your apps to an iPod Touch instead. It will work fine and will just require a wifi connection to be able to connect to the internet. The only limitations are some features available on iPhone and not on iPodTouch (GPS, 3G network, Camera,…).
That’s pretty much it for the prerequisites.
In my case, I don’t have an iPhone yet and will be using an iPod Touch for testing. For now, I test the small apps that I have to write from the book on the simulator only and will sign up for the iPhone Developer program once I’m done with the book.
My goal right now, is to finish this head first book and do all the exercises by the end of 01/12/2010 (6 days away). I started 10 days ago and I’m already through 2/3 of the book so it’s achievable.
At this point, I feel like I already have a good understanding of how to do simple TableView based applications so that’s rewarding. By the time I’m done with this first book, I should have a good understanding of the major concepts. After that, I plan to go deeper with other materials (no books this time) which I’ll cover later on in this blog.

Tags: application, development, developpement, head first, iphone, ipod touch, object oriented programming, programmation, programming, xcode