Since AxoNeuron mentioned it was so good, I went ahead and purchased it. I'm planning on learning Swift, but still have a long way to go and wanted to learn Objective-C first.
I decided to start learning programming and Obj-C a few months ago starting in May. I've purchased a few books, and have tried the Stanford/iTunes U course, along with various YouTube and tutorial sites like CodeWithChris and others. After all this time, I find I'm looking at code and just not understanding what's going on. Dot notation, method calls, that darn self keyword... sometimes it's in method calls, and others times it's in dot notation. I've been struggling with all of it. Until today.
I'm only 10% into the course and I finally understand a bunch of things now! I've been trying to think of why this course is better than others I've tried, and I think this course really takes you through in baby steps. Regardless how other courses or tutorials say you don't need a programming background, I think they assume too much on the part of the reader/watcher. This course really goes slow, and seems to explain things in a way that makes it easier to understand. Of course it could be a combination of the other courses/books and then watching this course that makes it all work... I don't know. I just know that with this course, I keep finding myself going "Ohhhhh, NOW I get it!"
I can't wait to try the Swift course once I get this Obj-C course out of the way.
Yes it's a great course. Don't be afraid to get distracted and do your own side projects along the way. For example, I started in May and I'm still only 70% finished because I am taking it very closely and supplementing everything with other courses from Lynda and side projects of my own, I think I've learned a lot faster doing it this way (as strange as that sounds). Lynda costs $25 per month. You don't have to do Lynda if you don't want to, there's probably a huge amount of stuff out there for free. But when I was trying to learn Core Data via the iOS 7 course, they barely spent 10 minutes on it, which is understandable since it really deserves it's own course.
If you do use Lynda, I'd recommend watching ALL of Simon Allardice's courses. He is THE best programming teacher I've ever seen. The only reason I still recommend the iOS 7 and iOS 8 Bitfountain/Stacksocial course is because they cover EVERYTHING which is good for a beginner.
Here is one of my side projects, I spent a week or so making it. I just made a full featured app that models the gravitational attraction between the planets. It's really cool because, for example, the moon in my simulation will only orbit the earth if you give it the actual velocity and distance that it has in real life (or use the equation to calculate needed velocity for a given distance).
The coolest thing is that it orbits in a perfectly accurate ellipse, at 60fps, the exact same orbit as the actual moon, since it uses the same equations that describe gravity. It goes in to the circular orbit without me having ever told it to explicitly go in a circle, it just does it all by itself. It sounds easy, just using a few equations. But it was the first time I ever did anything like this, so for me it was a learning experience, figuring out how to deal with huge numbers (ie. can't use a regular old int to describe the mass of the earth lol) and how to optimize it so that it isn't using 100% CPU, which was hard at first. I also had a few bugs originally, the worst bug was that it would only orbit the earth if the earth were in a specific position. It turns out that I had mistyped a CGPoint so that the moon was orbiting the earth's (y, y) position and not it's real (x, y) position.
I know it won't impress anyone but I am really happy with it. I didn't start learning until May. I am a full time student and part time job so I can't pour all my time in to it. I have not learned any animation frameworks, So I just did animation using NSTimer and dynamically changing the position of the view objects. I'm looking forward to learning probably more efficient ways of doing it, but animation wasn't the most important thing to learn for me yet.
