Beginning Table Views · Indexing Your Table | Ray Wenderlich


This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.raywenderlich.com/5995-beginning-table-views/lessons/50

This lesson needs more explanation behind what these methods are doing, it felt very un-natural not to check the app at different stages and add the methods to fix problems as you go.

@idesignpixels What did you find difficult to understand exactly?

Hi Brian. As a beginner like me I have a few questions. How do you bridge the gap from being a beginner to learning the swift language to programming complex apps like the tableview with the index sections? What I find difficult to understand is how do you teach yourself which and how many methods to use to make it work? And how do you make the decision to use return objects like " return UILocalizedIndexedCollation.current().section(forSectionIndexTitle: index)" ? I mean from beginner books to this. Where does this type of complex stuff get taught? How do you get to make this kind of decision that exactly this code is what you want and still make it work so that the app works accordingly. I find it very tough to understand. I really want to learn it. But I would never be able to come up with this stuff on my own. Hope you can help out with this.
Really like your videos btw. Best regards

Hi there Tommy,

For the most part, this stuff isn’t taught. Or it’s taught in specific deep dives of a particular API. Once you know your way around an API and feel comfortable with the language, the best place to go is to the official documentation. Especially with table views. There are so many things that are available that we don’t cover and probably not covered except in questions on stack overflow. You’ll see various methods will take new objects. Check out those objects - see what they do. Ask questions. Be inquisitive. And above, experiment.

From time to time, check your own knowledge. Try explaining a concept to another person. Answer questions on forums. If you don’t know something or actually had a bad misunderstanding of a topic, that’s okay. Failure leads to wisdom and that is a good thing.

Just keep asking questions and learning. I hope that helps!

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I have to agree with Tommyp - this last section is extremely overwhelming. We are typing code that is not explained, going back to fix errors just before the video’s end and not even checking the state of the app. The sections so far were great and easy to follow. This one however is tedious to both follow and understand.

I appreciate the feedback. We’re in the process of redoing this course that will greatly simplify it. It should be released soon. Thanks!