A teacher's guide to Matt Neuburg's Programming iOS 5 (Part 1)


In my previous post, I advised potential readers of Matt Neuburg's book to begin elsewhere, and to use this book as the second or third stage in their learning. In this post I place myself in the position of someone (perhaps a teacher) advising how to make the most out of this book on a first reading.


First, I would strongly advise anyone using this book as their initial inroad into Xcode and iOS 5 to start at Chapter 2, ignoring everything that precedes this. The first chapter for a newbie is a baptism of fire and the range of terms and promises of future explanations leaves one's head spinning to such an extent that many will be quickly turned off.

All one really needs to know on their first pass at this book, in order to skip the first chapter, is that the abbreviation K&R refers to a book about the C programming language, which is the precursor to Objective-C, the language used by Xcode.

The prefatory material meanwhile should also be set aside because the newbie is likely to be confused by having the evolution and variants that precede iOS 5 - something that they don't need to be aware of at this early stage - described.

Chapter 3 should also be set aside for similar reasons to Chapter 1. The first approach I recommend therefore takes in Chapters 2, 4 and 5. This provides a far gentler introduction to Objective-C and its main elements - e.g. methods, classes, instance variables - right up to using Xcode for the first time. 



Ideally a teacher would either step through these chapters one at a time or alternatively advise students that they be holiday reading required before the commencement of a course.



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