This year’s class was taught by the students and teachers from Canberra Grammar School’s Code Cadets. This is based on their 10 year class at the school where the actually teach their students how to develop a class. The structure of the class teaches not only the basics of iOS, but also a structure of how you program. I find that many classes tell us about how to write for a platform a do a poor job of explaining how to think like a programmer.

The structure of the class was setup into two sections:
1) Introduction to Objective-C
2) Introduction to iOS Development

During the Objective-C section, our instructor went the basics. Comments,code structure, variables, if’s and loops. Expression evaluation was also covered. I’ve seen many classes skip this, which causes a lot of basic programming mistakes early on. The approach they use was to have very simple assignments (both on paper and inside of xCode) to reinforce the learning projects. Nicely done.

I also learned that a habit I’ve been following for twenty years is called Camel Case. I must have learned that years ago, when I was learning Pascal. Cool! The other major AHA! moment from the class was the “fizz-buzz” test. Evidently this will easily weed out people who don’t understand programming, and so many people who apply for programming jobs, can’t program! Amazing!!!

We then got into Object-Oriented Programming. There were four major classes that were explained to the class: NSNumber, NSString, NSArray, and NSDictionary. Another learning point for me, NS prefix is from NextStep! You now know that you can figure out where Apple got various class libraries. (Well sorta).

The overall class was great, but as a one day class, and with as many people as there were in the room, we barely scratched the surface of iOS programming. The good part was that each attendee got a book with all the exercises, and there will shortly be a dropbox location for all the sample code. I had a great time, and meet some cool people throughout the day.

A shout out to my lunch and dinner friends!