[ChristinaM]

tl;dr: Email course + a live session Q&A to teach you how to build a simple iOS app that fetches gists from the GitHub API and displays them in a table view. JSON + networking + showing results in UI.

Sign up by May 4.

One of the authors here, AMA.

[tjl]

I like that it's coming through by e-mail. Are you expecting that we play with the code for the lesson in a playground?

P.S. This has got to be somewhat challenging to do while living on a boat.

[equalarrow]

This is called a drip campaign my friend. Marketing 101. I expect along the way there will be a few emails that contain some info to buy something - a class, another lesson, book, etc. nothing wrong with this and I think it's a nice way for devs to offset time costs associated with free.

Now, for building RESTful JSON apps, it's actually not hard at all. Your two friends in this are:

NSJSONSerialization NSURLSession

Apple has made a lot of progress in his area and, from my experience, where people go wrong is using some other library to handle these tasks. Granted, other libraties are there because someone saw an opportunity to 'simplify' things, but more times than not, they're abused and misused.

My advice, get to know the above classes and separae your your networking and model de/serializing into other parts of your app architecture. Do not shove all this oun a view controller!

Think about clean separation and you'll benefit later down the road. I've built about a dozen json api's and iOS app counterparts and this approach has always worked well.

Good luck!

[tjl]

I don't need to do any RESTful JSON apps at the moment, but this is being put on by a friend of mine and I like to learn new skills in the event I need them for something else. Thanks for the pointer!

[ChristinaM]

You'll create your own Xcode project to try out the code. UI stuff in playgrounds works but it doesn't show you very well how to do table views in a real project.

Coding on a boat has it's ups and downs. I'm in an area with decent LTE now so it's not so bad. Having a partner for this course helps a lot.

[tjl]

I hadn't tried the UI stuff in playgrounds (I use it for experiments mostly). I'll take your advice and set up a project. Table views are useful, but a definite pain point.

Good luck!