Two More iPhone Boot Camp Workshops

I'll be teaching the iPhone Boot Camp in New York City again on December 5-7. Like last time, I'll be teaching one half of a six-day workshop, with Steve Kochan doing the other half, so the full dates are December 2-7, and it's downtown, about two blocks from Penn Station, so it's easy to get there. Steve will be doing three days in Objective-C, and I'll follow with three days of iPhone development, and you can choose to take either class separately or both together.

We're also going to do the same format in Chicago on December 11-16, with the iPhone portion of the workshop that I'll be teaching happening on December 14, 15, and 16.

I'll post links to the signup page once I've received them from the iPhone Boot Camp folks.

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Posted in: Workshop

OpenGL Workshop

Okay, listen up. Anyone who's planning on attending 360|iDev and who is also interested in learning OpenGL from a really, really great teacher, I've got some important news for you.

And no, the great teacher is not me.

But it is somebody I go to when I'm confused about OpenGL. It's a person who knows as much about computer graphics and game development as anyone I've ever met. The teacher is Noel Llopis, developer of (among other things) Flower Garden for the iPhone. Noel is an author, speaker, and game developer who is very active in the game industry, and he's teaching a threetwo day OpenGL ES class immediately before 360|iDev at the same venue. Hotel rooms at the conference price are available for the workshop, as well.

If you're interested in going, there's only one more day on the early bird rate, so you probably want to register ASAP.

This is the best resource currently available for learning OpenGL ES for the iPhone and spaces are limited.

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Posted in: conferences,OpenGL ES,Workshop

Workshop Done

I am back home, at my desk for the first time since last Thursday.

The workshop went pretty well. Being the first time I had taught a class of that length, it was a bit stressful. It ended up being even more stressful than I had anticipated. A combination of a really, really bright group of students, and the fact that we provided the exercises in digital rather than printed form, meant that exercises that should have taken an hour, often took fifteen minutes. Because they were smart students, they absorbed material quickly, and because the instructions were provided digitally, they were able to copy and paste the code portions of the instructions, which is not only faster than having to type in the code, but it also has a considerably lower possibility for making mistakes. Frankly, we learn a lot more from making mistakes, than we do from having things work right the first time.

For the future, I will probably use printed exercises. I think the way most people learn, something that can be copied and pasted bypasses the type of brain processing that moves stuff from short-term memory to long-term memory. Now, I'm no psychologist, so I could be making it up, but I know that in my personal experience, when I've been able to just copy and past and then tweak somebody else's code rather than figure it out myself, the next time I needed to do it, I didn't really remember it.

All things considered, though, I felt like it went pretty well and I hope the students felt it was valuable and worth attending. I did run out of steam toward the end of the day Sunday, having only gotten about two hours of sleep each of the two previous nights (thank Dog for caffeine!), but we covered a lot more material than I ever anticipated over the course of three days. I think that the Keynote presentation I have right now is more honestly a week's worth of material for a more typical classes working from printed exercises.

Now of course, I'm scrambling to catch up even more than I was before. My inbox has really piled up, and I'm even further behind on the book. On top of that, our annual family vacation is coming up next week, so you probably won't see a long tutorial post for the next two weeks.

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Posted in: Status Update,Workshop

Boot Camp Imminent

Well, it's not just under 48 hours until I teach my first workshop. I'm a little harried right now. I'm comfortable teaching and speaking in front of groups, but I've never taught anything of this scope before, so I underestimated the prep time involved. I haven't slept much this week, and the situation doesn't look like it'll get much better before Friday.

If you e-mail me, IM, or tweet me in the next few days, please don't be offended if you don't get a response. I will try to catch up after the weekend and will be responding only to urgent e-mails in the meantime. I'm going to be mostly shutting out the world in an effort to get everything done and make sure that I'm satisfied with the workshop materials.

Despite the stress, I'm actually very happy with what I've gotten done so far. I think I'm really starting to understand what makes iPhone programming hard for both new programmers and experienced programmers coming from other languages. I guess we'll find out in a few days if I'm right about that, though.

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Posted in: Status,Workshop