Question

I have a week long holiday without ‘net access coming up. I’m interested in learning iPhone development. What applications, tutorials, documents and so forth should I download in order to learn and develop iPhone applications completely offline? Are there any steps I need to take to prepare my iPhone to have apps loaded on to it while I still have ‘net access?

Answer 1

The only thing you really need is a mac and the SDK. If you’re registered as a developer, download either 2.2.1 or the newer 3.0 beta. The 2.2.1 version is fine for learning on, at least until you want to start uploading apps. Make sure the documentation you need is downloaded by subscribing to it. Click Help->Documentation and on the left, you can see the documentation sets. Click subscribe for the ones you want, or all of them if you’re not sure.

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/index.action

You now have everything you need to start learning. If you want to try installing programs on your iPhone, you’ll need to get a developer certificate and generate your keys. This is tricky and takes time to get right. If you don’t want to do this, just use the iPhone Simulator, which is included in the SDK. Before you leave, download the Hello World program from the developer.apple.com site and try running it in the SDK. If you can “Build and Go” and see the iPhone Simulator, you should be set.

If you’re new to Objective-C, pick up “Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (3rd Edition)” by Aaron Hillegass. The teaching style is great and he explains the basics really well. The book is aimed at desktop programming, but there is no better introduction to Objective-C.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0321503619/

If you need something more iPhone specific, get “Beginning iPhone Development” by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche. They have very in depth examples. The teaching style isn’t as clear and the chapters are very long and involved but it’s thorough.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1430216263/

If you need another book, get “iPhone SDK Development” from Pragmatic Programmers. It’s a beta book, so there will be a few mistakes, but the style is much clearer and the chapters are a much more digestible length.

http://www.pragprog.com/titles/amiphd/iphone-sdk-development

Any one of those books will take you much longer than a week to digest, but they’re good starting points. There’s no harm in downloading the Stanford podcasts too for when you can’t read any more, but they’re no good as stand-alone guides. Don’t forget to download all their PDFs which have some great exercises.

Good Luck!