Hello Forums,
I don’t have a formal CS background because I learned mostly from this website as well as YouTube and Lynda. With that being said I learned a lot of my information through “Monkey see monkey do”. I’ve gotten to the point now where I do not know how to venture off on my own and translate my own thoughts into code.
I know that documentation is the key to it all but I am illiterate when it comes to reading documentation. Cocoapods, Apple Docs, Firebase Docs, Google APIs where do I begin? Is there some books or good tutorials out there on how to break it all down for the newbies?
Thanks!
1 Like
The process that worked for me is just to get started. IMO the best tutorials are here but it’s up to you to learn by taking the finished tutorials and then extending or altering them according to your own design. By experimenting and making a lot of mistakes you become a programmer, that’s how we all did it. You can find answers to the questions you will have in this forum, or on Stack Overflow, or in the tutorials, and maybe you can get involved in a local Cocoaheads group too, a great resource.
You will write some code that one day might embarrass you but that’s a big part of being a programmer. You will write pages of code that does exactly what you could have achieved with a one-line function, just because you didn’t know the API perfectly. Most of all you will make mistakes. Learning to program is like learning to play an instrument in that you have to be willing to do it badly for a while before you can get good. Start practising now.
I would suggest NOT using tools like Cocoapods initially. That’s a time-saving tool, which is fine when you understand exactly what it does and you can fix it if it goes wrong. But stick with the basics, no shortcuts, until you understand how to do what the tool is doing for you. Architects might always use CAD after they graduate, but they still use pens and ink while training.
1 Like
I agree with you @amendapp. I’ve taken various iOS courses that walk you through building real apps. This approach is nice but all I am really doing is retyping code that the instructor told us to type. My current process is that for every line of code I type, I refer back to UIKit’s API reference and try to understand where the instructor came up with the code. Like you, I have trouble understanding Apple’s well documented API reference docs. As developers, how can one understand the syntax if one can’t understand the official documentation?
1 Like