Last week I learned how to program on the iPhone using Objective-C and Cocoa Touch by having two 2-hour pair programming sessions with Brent Coursey and about 8 hours of my own playing around.
I am comfortable now with XCode, Interface Building and Objective-C – enough that I can build code to do what I want it to do, compile, run, debug, test and install on my personal iPhone.
I’ve connected to web services via Objective-C and built a user interface to interact with the services.
All in all it was a good experience and great way to learn – and the pair programming was very useful in speeding up the learning process. Unlike 10 years ago where I plenty of time to learn through trial and error, it was much more effective to sit and watch someone and see how everything worked together. I was able to pick it up very quickly that way.
Of course, 10+ years of object oriented programming in Java translates over well to the thinking and expectations – but the syntax and different ways of doing things were far from natural for a java programmer (especially one who had respectfully ignored the C way of doing things), so the demonstration received through pairing was immediately beneficial. (On second thought, ignoring C probably helped since I saw Objective-C as an OO language from the start – not as C)
A 2 hour session with Kent Beck sold on EBay for $405. That would be quite the experience – would love to do that and see how he or someone else at his level does their craft.
Filed under: Skills
