Objective-C and iOS Refresher

I’ve been on Christmas vacation now for about a week and won’t go back until some time after the new year so I think that it is time to have a well needed refresher before I start on any ideas for an app or make any kind of rough app design mockup. I’ve been spending time with family, eating good and stuffing myself to the point where I don’t want to do anything but sleep and watch college bowl games but now it’s about time to have a ‘sprint’ so to speak. I will brush through standard topics just to make sure I don’t miss anything then move on to things like Categories, Protocols, Property Lists, KVC, Blocks and Core Data – most of which I have just glanced over and haven’t applied it to any sample code (I like to go through a topic or two, then come up with a code snippet to do what I have read about and then finally, look at the docs to see if there anything else to add beyond the high-level topic concepts/examples that are given to me).

This gives me the opportunity to continually use the documentation online while going more than ‘skin deep’ on topics that most books just don’t include. Speaking of books, the pic above is a list of recent material that I have accumulated, so I will be using those as my go to default source and then when I want to branch out I will look at the docs/stack overflow/google etc for any extra insight/information that I can find.

More Intelligence or Just Artificial??

I just received this via e-mail today! That was a hard few months of learning but I am glad that I stuck with it and saw it through. I actually almost quit about half-way through because I felt like that I had too much going on and well, I probably did but I kept working through it even though I missed a couple of homework assignments(fortunately your two lowest homework scores were thrown out).

My best scores came from the topics of probabilities, search trees(general and specifically game trees – (advanced planning subtopics) ) and reinforcement learning. I guess the only somewhat bad news is that I didn’t get informed that i made the top 1% of everyone who decided to stay with it (LOTS of people dropped out for one reason or another). There was a rumor running around that 200 people got perfect scores so obviously with a 88% I didn’t make it in that ladder but I am happy that I took the course. Hopefully I can put it to good use for a future iOS or Mac OSX app or something along those lines…who knows!

Anyway hopefully I’ve become more intelligent and it’s not just artificial 😉