Apple’s iTunes music store has a section of free podcasts called “iTunes U”, which feature lecture media (videos, audio, PDF notes) for classes at a number of universities.

Someone recently mentioned to me that Stanford University’s “iPhone Application Programming” class¹ is available².

I’m thinking I may try to work my way through this set of lessons for a few reasons:

• It would be good for me to gain a better grasp of object oriented programming principles.
• The iPhone looks like a fun platform for which to program, with rich APIs that run the gamut from UI to animations to data storage (with SQLite as an option!).
• I’ve been running a lot of iPhone apps lately, and thinking of apps that should exist and might be interesting to develop.
• Free development tools, based in part on the gnu C compiler, with which I’m already a little familiar.
• If I managed to program anything worthwhile, there are a ton of potential users, and distribution (and sales if it’s a commercial app) would be remarkably easy due to the existence of the app store.

I’m amazed by the apparent number of other classes available for free download in “iTunes U”. I look forward to one day having enough spare time to actually look through more of them.

1. If iTunes is installed on your computer, clicking that link will take you to the page in iTunes from which you can download individual classes or subscribe to the entire feed. [↩]
2. I noticed that the class is co-taught by Alan Cannistraro, a former coworker of mine. It’s nice to see a familiar name. [↩]

This entry was posted on Friday, June 12th, 2009 at 6:39 pm and is filed under Apple, Development, Geeky. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.