Looking for good tutorials to help an ASP.NET guy learn iPhone development.

Question

I'm looking to broaden my horizons and develop some apps for the iPhone. I have 15 years of software development experience, starting with C++ and then transitioning to C#. Nearly all of my experience is developing for Microsoft platforms (Windows, ASP.NET, etc), with a brief stint doing some Java/Oracle stuff.

Does anyone have any suggestions on good tutorials that will help me come up to speed on XCode and the iPhone SDK? I don't really want a "this is a computer" level of introduction. I have written a couple of very simple iPhone apps that work, but I am still having a difficult time finding my way around in XCode and familiarizing myself with the SDK.

EDIT: Thanks for the responses. I should clarify that Objective-C isn't terribly confusing for me. A good walkthrough of XCode (especially Interface Builder), and a more thorough understanding of the relationship of the important classes in the iPhone SDK would do me wonders. I could also do with some "best practices" on structural layout of an iPhone application.

Answer 1

One thing I would recommend is to get some sort of cheat sheet to help you learn your way around using keyboard shortcuts and perhaps find hidden functionalities that you didn't know about as well!

Answer 2

One book you should pick up right off the hop is Kochan. The most highly recommended book introducing people to Objective-C. In addition, there are loads of videos and sample code on developer.apple.com.

Answer 3

I found the Stanford iPhone class on iTunes U a very nice introduction. It's got homework!

Answer 4

The stanford university has a youtube channel with iphone dev. lectures:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQzLHgls63E&feature=channel

They also have a website that contains all those projects from the lectures: http://www.stanford.edu/class/cs193p/cgi-bin/drupal/downloads-2010-winter

Stanford is really awesome :)

Answer 5

I would suggest getting started with Xcode 4, rather than starting on version 3 - enough has changed that you will find things very confusing when it is released for real in a short while and you find none of the new hotkeys you have learned work any more. Any registered iPhone developer can download Xcode 4 developer release 2 from the Apple developer site. I really hope the Cocoa Samurai cheat sheet is updated for Xcode 4 soon.

(It does crash, but I am finding it usable)

I think you've done exactly the right thing in jumping in with some projects to get started. Now you know you can do stuff, start getting some more depth in the features that interest you most or that will be most useful for the apps you have in mind. That might be Core Data, OpenGL, Grand Central... Of course the basics like how views and controllers work are essential. You'll absorb that along the way.

Another good strategy is to pick a question on Stack Overflow every day and to go work out the answer. Without checking back to see of someone else solved it. Some days you learn something interesting quickly, other days it takes all day.

Now the tutorial aspect - I used Stanford's ITunes University videos initially and thought they were the most useful thing overall, although I don't use Interface Builder too much any more - mostly just to visualize something I am thinking of doing, then I do the actual UI in code. The Apple WWDC videos are my second favorite resource. When you want to know about one topic they will show you tricks and tips you won't find anywhere else. There's a tipping point of understanding I think all programmers go through, I remember when I "got" pointers the first time - the WWDC video was what made me "get" delegates.

Finally, Matt Gallagher's blog Cocoa With Love has some really excellent articles on things you need to know but are not really covered by the Apple material - things like how to move a text input out of the way of the keyboard, or how to do nice custom UITableViewCell drawing.

Good luck and happy programming!