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iOS How Much Should I Read Every Day?!

Metal Dice

Metal Dice

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 3, 2009
233
0
Denmark
Hey i'm 15 years old and learning Objective-C as my first computer programming language. Right now i'm reading about 30 pages every second day, it may sound like i'm not reading enough but when i read a chapter i make sure i understand it 100% and then i go trough it one more time. But i still wonder if i'm reading enough pages per day.
How much do you guys recommend reading. Right now i have Summer vacation, but, lets say i have no vacation and its just a regular day.

Note: I have about 2-4 hours of available time every day.

Thanks in advance
 
Read as much as you want, but not so that you can't understand what you've read.
 
I think it's admirable at your age that you're trying to learn something other than what you're learning in school. Learning Objective C will help you in many ways in years to come, even if you never make an app, since you're learning about OOP. Anyway, try to learn at your own pace. There is no hard and fast rule. You can only go too fast and then be confused later, when you should've gone slower.
 
I understand that everyone's learning style is different, but there is no way I could digest or retain large amounts of data. I'm a hands-on or tactical person, so I would need to take that compiler out and do some practical work whilst only relying on the book for reference here and there...

Good luck dude..
 
Read as fast as you can without becoming completely lost, but take notes about the important sections you aren't completely clear about. It's very possible that some of the stuff at the beginning will become clearer after you skim to the end. Try to get through the entire thing in a fraction of your allotted time, so that you have plenty of time to go back, carefully reread the stuff you need to, work with some of the more interesting problem sets, and perhaps, if you're quick, even have time to start exploring more advanced material or books.

There's a compromise between knowing almost everything about very few pages, and knowing almost nothing about an entire bookshelf. Do a little of both.

ymmv.
 
I agree about the note taking. There are many studies showing the the mechanical action of writing the material out by hand improves understanding and retention. It definitely helps me.
 
Metal Dice said:
Hey i'm 15 years old and learning Objective-C as my first computer programming language. Right now i'm reading about 30 pages every second day, it may sound like i'm not reading enough but when i read a chapter i make sure i understand it 100% and then i go trough it one more time. But i still wonder if i'm reading enough pages per day.
How much do you guys recommend reading. Right now i have Summer vacation, but, lets say i have no vacation and its just a regular day.

Note: I have about 2-4 hours of available time every day.

Thanks in advance
Click to expand...


out of interest did you learn C first? or know another language first?

i got advised to learn C before moving onto objective C so thats what im doing.
 
well starting with C can help,

I would say go through the book and i am assuming they show coding examples and get you to create some projects.
What i would recommend is after you have made them, play around with them and kind of mod the project so you change certain parts of it and really get a feel for what ever you are making.

Read as much as you like, but some stuff just may not make 100% sense untill you get to the end and come back and look at it, and other stuff you may think you know but when you come back to it later you may find you were wrong.

Also if you are going to try and make apps for example, i would suggest starting by making something you would want to make (something simple to) so atleast then you can have fun making it rather than just making for someone else
 
Well... does the book teach you about pointers?
Really, you need to know some C before you learn Objective-C. Pointers, and how they work with memory is important since so many people have problems with memory leaks and over-releasing (crashes).

Then there are little gotchas (declaring variables at beginning of scope in a switch, and I"m sure there are others).

Objective-C as a first language isn't a good choice at all IMO.

The very first thing you learn is how to instruct a computer to do work for you.
Flow control and other fundamentals. Even that stuff takes a while to master, the last thing I would want to worry about is memory management, pointers, non-descriptive compiler errors and warnings.

I always advocate a learning language like Turing or VB first - that's how I learned.

But yeah, maybe you could be John Carmack and be completely self-taught, then again, there is only 1 John Carmack.
 
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