I am thinking of going to the pragmatic studio iphone course, but am a little wary due to the price. I currently do contract work and therefore don't have a company that will pay the course costs for me, other than mine of course.
After travel, food, hotel and currency conversion the course runs up to over 3500.
Is it worth it?
I personally have not been but I hear Bill Dudney is great. It sounds expensive but maybe you can right it off for tax purposes, that being said anytime you get a chance to learn something, it's probably worth it. If you think that you would like to make commercial iPhone apps, AND you think you can make at least $3500 dollars doing this, then I say go for it. If you think your just going to be doing this as a hobby or you think you'll make less than $3500 then I totally agree with Simucal.
P.S. Maybe you could write a tutorial on how to make iPhone apps after this. Also the networking section looks fun!
I'm honestly not a fan of coding bootcamps or short duration courses in terms of cost/benefit.
If money wasn't an issue I would say go for it but since you are paying your own way and brought up the money aspect I'm going to assume that at least some consideration must be taken before dropping $3.5k.
I find that I can honestly absorb much more material and at greater depth by simply reading a book and attempting exercises or small projects myself. Certainly there are some tips & tricks that can be imparted to you through actual instruction that you might not glean right away from self-learning but those things won't be the bulk of the knowledge you have to learn.
These programs remind me of short duration certification bootcamps: expensive and of little substance. You have to be realistic, you are there for 4 days. You are going to learn how to setup the development environment, shown some canned examples that you follow along with illustrating the basics of the accelerometer, photos, and other iPhone basics.
Is that really worth it to you? To me, a serious professional developer would simply sit down with a few of the cocoa/iPhone books and start banging out some chapters on their time off.
So, in my opinion, save yourself some money and spend $90 bucks on some books and take a few days off work.
I hemmed and hawed about the BigNerd Ranch bootcamp and decided against it.
Classrooms are great, and you can really learn a lot, but I think I would benefit more from an advanced bootcamp for iPhone now vs one for newbies to the platform back them.
Knowing how stuff works makes it easier to learn how similar stuff works. Having a class on hardcore multi-threading, UI best practices, various networking patterns, and in-depth CoreAnimation...that is a bootcamp you could sell videos of, let alone pack to the rafters right now.
What I found was doing real projects and trying to make stuff teaches you far more than a classroom setting would, and faster. Get your hands dirty, and start making mistakes.