I'm currently taking a break from the iOS course on treehouse; lots of C, lots of Xcode and is totally awesome. What the heck is treehouse?
Well it's here : Treehouse!
I work primarily with Microsoft technologies, SCCM, Powershell to name a couple, and have wanted for some time to expand my skills base as outsourcing has made system admin-esque roles like mine harder to come by but, more importantly, harder for business' to justify. In my view this has been caused by a perfect storm of poor communication, poor management skills and the availability of low priced offshore options. That is a discussion for another day but it does serve as an excellent motivator and had me researching ways I could increase my skills in ways that also honed my current ones and were applicable to my work; after all I haven't lost my job yet and I can always be better at it!
One of my main criteria was to focus on code that was object oriented so I could improve my PS by proxy but I also wanted to be creative as well. It wasn't enough to simply produce "back-end" code and create projects that I would be happy with, I wanted something tangible and something I could show someone outside of the tech realm. If I could deliver it to the palm of someone’s hand, which was appealing, so it was down to Android (Java) or iOS (Obj-C) and given I had studied Java at uni and wanted to broaden my horizons Objective-C it is.
Treehouse
Treehouse offers online training in a number of different coding areas. Their main focus is mobile and web development but they have numerous courses covering everything from business soft skills to wordpress management to SEO it's quite comprehensive. I chose Treehouse for it's consistent revaluation of the core skills being taught and easy to understand presenters. If only they did .Net they'd be perfect. I certainly enjoy the interface, the site being a testament to the principles taught. I am finding the initial sections of my iOS "track" a hard slog to get through but this is only because I've had previous experience. If you were totally new to programming, be it for device or web, Treehouse is perfect for you. I am using it as a framework to create beautiful, well-crafted applications so a little bit of review can't go astray. Practice makes perfect.
I have coupled this process with Design+code to ensure design is a main focus for my projects. I see these programs as art as well as code so this is very important to me. Once I have something to show for this process I will post screen shot and, hopefully, it will be something worthwhile!
