All the Cocoa programming that could be crammed into 5 days

I just spent the last week attending the Cocoa bootcamp from Big Nerd Ranch. I have one thing I'd like to clear up before I get started. The hat is just a prop. That's right, when you go to WWDC and you see Aaron Hillegass walking around with his big texas style cowboy hat, he's doing it for marketing purposes. I guess it works, because when I decided to get some Cocoa training, I remembered Aaron and the hat walking around the Moscone center and on the back of his book: Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (2nd Edition)

Now, I'm not normally a fan of technical training. Give me a book and a web browser and a project and I'm good. Of course this leads to interesting situations like the time I reverse engineered the Windows virtual to physical address mapping structures while not knowing how to refresh an explorer window (It's F5, right?).

I've been poking around in Cocoa for a while now, and though I feel like I made some decent progress, I'm really interested in this technology and wanted to get a comprehensive overview of it from an expert. Sometimes you just want to do things “right.” I figured that in 5 days I'd get a quick but comprehensive overview of most of the technologies in Cocoa from a well known expert in the technology.

The course did not disappoint. We dove right in to code, with Aaron leading us through an example application immediately, before even lecturing. All the lectures were relatively short, and most of the time in the class was spent actually coding. We mostly followed along with the exercises in the book, but we were encouraged to explore and change things as we progressed. In four and one half days we covered nearly the entire book, as well as several additional chapters that were part of the course materials.

In the evenings, most people chose to come back to the classroom and either continue to work on the exercises or to work on a personal project. Aaron typically stayed around until about 10PM answering questions and being generally helpful.

Out on our daily walk (image courtesy of Paul Warren)

The people who took the class came from all over the country and the UK and had varied backgrounds and skill levels, but overall, they were extremely competent and interesting folk. It was enjoyable to meet each of them. I was surprised at how many people were paying their own way to take this class, which was not an insignificant investment in personal time and money. I estimate that about half of the people were there on their own ticket.

The price of the course covers ground transportation to and from the airport, lodging and all meals as well as a copy of Aaron's book and course materials. If you don't want to bring your own computer, a modern iMac will be provided for you to use.

View from my suite

The place we stayed, Serenbe Southern Country Inn, was probably one of the nicest places I've ever stayed. My personal suite had a screened in porch, a kitchen, a large living room with fireplace, a king size bed, whirlpool tub and huge glass shower. They fed us three excellent meals each day, along with snacks and drinks as we wanted them through the day.

I really benefited from this class. Some topics seem complex when you try to explore them on your own, but Aaron was able to make them very accessible. Cocoa Bindings had always seemed somewhat inscrutable to me, but now things are much clearer. The Undo Manager in Cocoa is amazing; it really showcases how a dynamic language can be leveraged to make something that can be hard in other frameworks really easy. And I now feel like I understand how to build custom Views - something that always seemed difficult to me but is actually quite straightforward now.

The idea of a total immersion environment, with all details taken care of and few distractions, along with a very experienced and patient instructor, leads to a learning environment that encourages success. I highly recommend this class to anyone who would like to learn Cocoa.