Yes I said free! This is a great resource for anyone interested in learning how to create iPhone/iPad apps. The course consists of a series of lectures covering the various aspects of iOS programming required to create apps. Don’t let the fact that the course is free fool you.  They serve real meat and potatoes.

The course consists of a total of 43 video lectures that run about an hour. There are also homework assignments that you will need to complete. Of course, no one is actually going to check your homework but you can form peer-review groups and ask questions on the Piazza site for the class. The class instructor is Paul Hegarty (pictured right), former VP of Engineering at NeXT Computing. He really knows his stuff and presents the material very clearly.

You will definitely need some object-oriented coding experience to get through this class.   If you do not yet know, iOS apps are written in objective-c and developed in X-Code, which only runs on a Mac (sorry Windows users).  Don’t worry if you don’t have any experience in objective-c you will learn everything you need to know in the course.  The prior object-oriented programming experience is important however so if you don’t have any you will want to look into another course first.

If you have any interest whatsoever I couldn’t recommend this course more.  I think you will be surprised with the quality and how much you can actually learn from a free online class.

Here is a link to the course page: CS 193P iPhone Application Development

For those interested, here is a link to other free courses offered by Stanford University: Stanford | Online