I'm interested in learning the coding to make apps To you devs, what book or program do you recommend? How much time will I expect to invest in this? Thanks!
time Ok if you never coded before , be prepared to work. Its not easy at all but you get used to it after 3-6 months. I use a engine called game editor , which can be used only to make 2D games. 1st learn 2D before jumping into 3D which is pretty tough.
if you plan to really do something worthwhile.. get a book or two on objective-c coding.. and look into the cocos2d engine for the begining.. its a 2d engine.. i would not suggest using any "game editors" because you'll invest time learning the wrong stuff.. if you want to code , learn objective-c... this may be harder at first but the time invested will recoup later.. how long will this take.. that depends on what you know about programming, how well you can seld educate yourself.. you won't be doing much stuff within a half year.. possible not a year if your a bloddy amateur.. in general one cannot generalize the time it takes to learn something.. that always dependant on well you
Like most things in life, the more you put into it the more you will get out of it. If you want to be a musician, play music everyday. If you want to be a programmer, write code every day. It does not guarantee that you will succeed or indeed ever be any good, but if you don't practice frequently you will never succeed or be any good. If you truly do not have any programming experience, Objective-C has a pretty steep learning curve for a beginner. JavaScript, BASIC and Python are all good learning languages. Python has a nice framework for making games called PyGame which will help you if your goal is to become a game programmer. Good luck and enjoy your learning.
game editor @ Mr. Ugly how can you comment on something you dont even know about? Game Editor programming language is C , is that the wrong langauge to learn? Instead of answering questions , I see you like to take shots at people. Dont disrespect the fine people who created Game Editor just because its not your favorite tool or you dont like me. Common lets grow up a little here. Do I follow you around trying to disagree with you for the sake of disagreeing ? No let be mature. The man is looking for help so lets help him and cut the non-sense. Its becoming a little too much already , have some respect. This thread is about someone looking for help not for debate. Save debates for your own thread and leave people alone.
Jeez pal, start learning to read, i wrote "game editors" not your game editor. Game editors, for example game salad and the others click together stuff. i don't know your game editor you use but if its not something working with within of xcode you can forget it.. thats not the right path to learn programming. if what i wrote above is not clearly targeted at his question you need to get your eyes checked.. And to answere your question, yes c is the wrong language to learn. Not c, not c++ not c# The language is objective-c thats where he should start if he wants to get serious with developing for iOS.
I agree with you that the click together stuff it's a total waste of time. You'll outgrow it eventually and all that time learning cool tricks to get the editor to do some halfway decent stuff will be wasted. However I think jumping right in into objective C is also a mistake. With no previous knowledge it's a monumental task to be able to program something half way decent and I can close to 100% guarantee you'll give up before ever finishing anything. I think the right answer is something in between. Maybe something like Unity, but that's 3D, which might not be the best way to start either. I really like Corona for example. You still have to learn a real programming language (Lua in this case), but it's far more motivating to see results on screen quickly without having to mess with unrelated "setup stuff". I went from knowing no programming at all, to having a finished game (it's quality to be determined by Mr. Ugly shortly) in 5 weeks. That's something you'd never be able to accomplish with objective c. Now that I'm a little more comfortable programming, I can start looking at objective c more seriously if I start to feel limited by my current engine of choice. tl;dr Stay away from the click stuff and objective c, don't reinvent the wheel, use middleware.
research Like I said research , in Game Editor you dont slap stuff together. Like you said you dont know what Iam using so dont make assumtions either. Just because you like a certain path to learn , dont say others are wrong. Just state your info and move on. Why is that so hard to do ? For you information you need to be pretty good in C language to make anything meaningful.
Don't get so defensive, no one is attacking game editor. Though I do have to question it's performance on iphone. Isn't iOS support relatively new? How well does it work? and why recommend something that doesn't perform as well as other specific iphone engines, but is still massively difficult (having to learn C)? If you wanna focus solely on iphone development it really makes no sense to learn C, go for objective C right away. Of course it's different if you already know it, but the OP is new to programming.
a good way to start and get right into the meat of it 1) download iphone dev kit from Apple's website 2) learn how to run the example code 3) Start with a example code closest to what you want to make then start changing the code and see what happens.
