My journey to write my first iPhone app

I am on a journey to write my first iPhone app. I have 2 apps planned that I want to write. I have programmed in the past, I’ve worked with VB 6 on Windows and I design websites using PHP every day. So I did my research to figure out where to start. If you haven’t done any programming you should learn C Programming language first. So thats where I am starting. C is a good base language to learn. Learning C will get you on your way to writing a program for the iPhone and it is the basis language for Java, C++, and Objective-C.

Know that I have a place to start I found the book for me. I bought “Learning C on the Mac” by Dave Mark from the publisher Apress. Apress has a good series of books for learning to program on the Mac.
Here is my syllabus of books:

I’ll try to post a daily update. I’ll post weekly updates on my progress.

Day 1: OK I read the first 5 chapters in “Learning C on the Mac”. I am starting to see the similarities between C, PHP and Java. If you know Java or PHP you should have no problem with this book.

Day 2: Read Chapter 6 and I was a little confused at the end of this chapter. I was having problems with the Exercise 2 and 3 of the tutorial at the end of the chapter. Exercise 2 is to write a program to compute the prime numbers from 1 to 100 and Exercise 3 is write a program to compute the first 100 prime numbers. Since I was so confused I think I’ll re-read the previous 2 chapters again. Now I can see why the said it will take you a few months to learn C.

Week 1: I can’t believe that 1 week has gone by already. C is a little harder than I thought. I’ve read the first 8 chapters so I tried to write my first C program. It is a simple random number generator for the lottery. I am still having a couple problem generating numbers that don’t repeat in a list.

Week 2: Well it has been a little over 2 weeks and I am really starting to understand the code more and more. I just keep reading each chapter over and over. I think that I have read the book in total about 3 times. But I have completed my first C program! My first C program is a Lottery number generator. At first I had a couple problems where there the program would pick the same number multiple time on one ticket. But that is fixed now and the program works flawlessly. I found a good resource for learning C and C++. CProgramming.com is an awesome website with lots of tutorials for C and C++. They posted a great article “5 Ways you can learn Programming“. After reading this article I agree with it 100%. I knew a little programming so I took it way to fast and when I got to the end of the book I was really confused. So I went back and took my time, wrote a simple little program and now I understand every thing that I been reading.

http://www.syclonefx.com/2009/05/25/my-journey-to-write-my-first-iphone-app/

http://www.syclonefx.com/2009/05/25/day-2-of-my-journey-to-write-my-first-iphone-app/

http://www.syclonefx.com/2009/05/27/day-3-of-my-journey-to-write-my-first-iphone-app/

http://www.syclonefx.com/2009/06/02/week-1-of-my-journey-to-write-my-first-iphone-app/

http://www.syclonefx.com/2009/06/11/week-2-of-my-journey-to-write-my-first-iphone-app/

One Response to “Programming”

1. MacMajor.com says:

   May 31, 2009 at 11:01 AM

   [...] been following a couple of different guys on there journey to write an iPhone app. CollegeKidApp.com and SycloneFX.com are on a journey to write their first iPhone [...]