I think there was a similar discussion in the previous version’s forum but I just wanted to get a feel for what everyone is doing after finishing this book?
I am close to the end and I loved the approach that this book took. I am planning on working on some small apps of my own after this, just to get my foot in the door as a published app developer (don’t worry, it’s not just a calculator app). Alongside jumping into coding on my own, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions for “intermediate/advanced” books for iOS dev. I looked into the books that Ray Wenderlich has but those seem to be more geared solely towards the changes from one iOS version to the next. Do you guys think it’s worth it to look for a book that dives deeper into more advanced topics of iOS as a whole?
Reading more programming books will help, but only to a certain extent. Practice, a lot of practice, should also be an important part of one’s learning activities to develop programming skills.
I always ask my students to tackle the following problem at the end of the training I provide.
Problem
A list of numbers, not all distinct, and a target number are given. Determine if the target number can be computed from the numbers in the list by using only the arithmetic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. If the answer is yes, show the computation used to arrive at the answer.
All given numbers are positive integers. There is no requirement to use all of the numbers in the list and all of the arithmetic operations; use only the ones needed. There are also two restrictions. A given number can be used only once, and division operations that result in remainders are not allowed.
The front end of the code, the GUI part, is quite straightforward; however, the back end is quite a challenge because there is no deterministic algorithm to solve the problem.
There are actually a lot of books at Raywenderlich.com hat aren’t specific to the latest iOS changes. I think you may be looking at the iOS11, iOS10, etc, books. For my own progression, I read both the RW Apprentice series as well as the BNR Swift and iOS books, all of which were top notch. The limitation is probably me. I still needed more practice to really solidify and get comfortable.
Maybe you can try one of the more specific books at RW like the one on animations, or some other topic that interests you, they have a lot of short tutorials over there (and also around the web, too) that you could use as well. Try googling for a tutorial related to your area of interest, or where you feel least confident. You could try to pick up a Swift Algorithms book, or start building your own app (this one will probably help the most since you will have the motivation to solve the issue, and being a bit emotionally involved will imprint that knowledge a bit deeper into your mind. My challenge has always been getting the UI to do what I wanted rather than algorithms, so getting more practice in Xcode via other tutorial projects has been useful as well.
Just saw the RW Apprentice books, they sound awesome. I’m sure there will be some overlap between that and the BNR books but it looks really cool. I am the same as you, I still feel like I need more practice but I am also a big believer in learning by doing. So I think I will continue to build some basic apps and grow from there and work through the Apprentice book at the same time