Ask HN: Best iOS resource for non-iOS-developers?

[sofuture]

What are the best resources for an experienced programmer looking to pick up up ObjC and iOS? I'm specifically not looking for 'in-24-hours' or 'without-writing-a-line-of-code' type things, nor screen casts or video lessons. Thanks!

[OiNutter]

I learnt a lot from the Stanford online courses on ITunes U. Granted they are video lessons, but you can also grab all the lecture notes and sample code from this link:

http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/download...

Other than that I just googled the hell out of things, Stack Overflow was, as always, a valuable resource. Chances are that whatever you're trying to do, particularly when learning, somebody else has already done.

[donmcc]

Kochan's "Programming in Objective-C" is decent http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Objective-C-Edition-Develo... and I'm a big fan of Erica Sadun's "iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook" http://www.amazon.com/The-iOS-Developers-Cookbook-ebook/dp/B....

If you've never programmed in C, you may want to seek out a good C tutorial. You can get pretty far in iOS working only with Objective-C objects, but plenty of C-isms leak through so it helps to be familiar with pointers, structs, functions and memory management.

Objective-C isn't too hard to get up to speed with, especially if you've ever worked in both C and a dynamic language like Python or Ruby. Wrapping your head around Cocoa Touch is a little more daunting, but Sadun's book does a good job of building up the basics step by step, then providing chapters on specific frameworks you can page-fault in as needed.

Apple recently added "Start Developing iOS Apps Today" https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#referencelibrary/Ge... which is probably worth taking a look for a beginner.

[Kallikrates]

http://www.bignerdranch.com/books

[callmeed]

This seems to come up a lot lately. See my answer here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4050665