So, was it worth it all? Yes, I feel it was. It was probably the best learning experience I’ve had the pleasure of participating in. Having waited this long to write this post, I have a more objective view of what transpired. It’s not that I came away from the Big Nerd Ranch an absolute expert in iPhone development, on the contrary, I’m still very much a novice, but what it has given me is a solid foundation on which I can better build upon; one which would have taken a very long time to build on my own or at home. My situation at home is busy, I have a wife and 6 year old which keeps me busy, but I also have a busy work schedule, which at times, goes beyond the normal nine to five grind. So, being in such an environment, I may have only an hour, maybe two, per night to really dedicate time to working on iPhone development. At the Big Nerd Ranch, I was completely absorbed in learning about the iPhone, from the start of the day to the later hours in the evening, I was learning! A very different experience than something like conference, or being at a corporate training center, where breaking for lunch usually meant seeking food elsewhere, and class would normally end at 5pm or 6pm, then you were on your own. Over at Banning Mills, we were out in the country, nowhere near the bustling city of Atlanta, so there was no temptation to go running off to see the sights. We worked from 9:00 am till 6:30pm, with a break for breakfast, lunch, a brief hike, and dinner (no need to seek food!). We never left the facility, and we ate together as a group, so we all got to know each other. The teacher, Mark (for the weekend), and Joe (for the week), were with us, and stayed after dinner in the lab till 9pm or 10pm each night so we can continue working.

So where am I at now. Well, I’ve not really created anything solid on the phone, but I’m comfortable using XCode, reading the syntax, and able to at least write code and deploy it to my phone. I can easily look at all the resources on the web and understand what they are trying to accomplish. The overview of C/Objective-C, which was a little slow at first was very important for me, since I’ve studied C in the past, I hadn’t done any serious work in it, so having that foundation was extremely helpful for the remaining iPhone classes. The content got increasingly harder as the week progressed. The hardest part had to be the OpenGL ES section, it was alot of typing, and probably the only part of the bootcamp I didn’t get much out of, except an understanding of how hard raw OpenGL work can be.

In the end, I’m happy with what I learned and I’m also happy to have a group of people that have gone through the same thing I have and can call upon for help and suggestions. I would recommend anyone that’s interested in learning iPhone development to attend their bootcamp!

Today’s lessons were WebKit, Web Services, Media and OpenGL ES. The first three were very good and was of particular interest to me, since being a web developer, and web services are the way things are headed. The Media portion was fun, we got to learn how to play music, video and audio clips. OpenGL ES was a tough chapter. The exercise was very long, lots of typing, but it served as an intro to how difficult OpenGL ES is… There was an exceptional amount of code used to establish an OpenGL ES View, but once we were done, it wasn’t hard to see why OpenGL ES is powerful. We animated a box on the screen, which doesn’t sound that fantastic, but the animation on screen was exceptionally smooth and fast; this became even evident when I randomized the color background every screen refresh, which showed how has OpenGL can cycle colors, while animating the box.

The highlight of the day was when 11 of us took advantage of the Banning Mill’s Zip Line Tour. I’m not sure if having been working so much with the iPhone that I became more bold, but this tour had us start off a very high tower and had us riding a cable across the property at 40 miles/hour 150feet in the air — and I’m afraid of heights too! We ended up going across three zip lines and crossing several cable suspension bridges high above the valley. Quite an experience, and one that I’m glad I didn’t miss out on, I’ll post some videos and photos when I return home and have a chance to process them.

Tomorrow, we go over a few last topics, the Address Book, Resources, and we’ll touch on SQLLite. by 1pm we’ll be back on a bus to the airport and we all return to our normal lives, but better equipped to build the next great iPhone app!