Free tutorial, The iOS Apprentice: Getting Started
It’s been a while since I wrote for this blog but I had a good excuse: I’ve been working hard on my first ebook, The iOS Apprentice: iPhone and iPad Programming for Beginners.
I get a fair amount of email from beginning programmers and they usually ask the same questions. They’ve read a book or tutorial about the basics but now they’re stuck. It’s easy enough to create a simple screen with a few buttons, to show a list of items in a table view, to use the photo picker, to download something from the internet… but how do you fit all of that together? These are also the questions I keep seeing on forums and message boards. So I decided to write an ebook with the answers.
This ebook contains five epic-length tutorials, each of which takes you from scratch to a complete, fully-functional iPhone or iPad app, with step-by-step instructions and a ton of illustrations. There’s a big difference between building a simple sample project that focuses just on a single topic, and creating a real app that has many different features — the kind of app that you actually see in the App Store. The iOS Apprentice shows you how to do the latter.
This is what Bull’s Eye looks like, the game from the first chapter:
You can see this game in action for yourself because as of today the first chapter of the ebook is available for free!
If you’re thinking of getting started with iOS development but you have no idea where to start, then get this ebook! No knowledge of programming is assumed, so if you’ve never written a line of code before in your life, you’re in good hands.
It is my aim that by the end of these 5 tutorials you’ll be ready to turn your own ideas into real apps. This isn’t some 20-page fluff ebook, but over 500 pages and more than 500 illustrations of hands-on practical advice.
I’m currently writing the final chapters. I expect the ebook to be done by the time iOS 5.0 comes out (early fall). Of course, the tutorials make good use of the new features from iOS 5 such as Automatic Reference Counting and Storyboards.
If this sounds like something you’d be interested in, then here’s how you can get the entire first chapter for free right now:
Go to www.raywenderlich.com and sign up for Ray’s Monthly Newsletter. Ray has an excellent site with many free iOS development tutorials, and he has agreed to sell The iOS Apprentice from his website, which makes me very happy.
After signing up for his newsletter — which is a very useful resource in its own right! — you’ll receive the download link for the first chapter (23 MB).
Enjoy the free chapter and let me know how you’re getting on! In the mean time, I have a few more pages to write… 
