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iOS Objective-C Basics (Retired) Introduction to Objective-C From Structs to Objects

Really Bad Video

Team TreeHouse I request you to replace this video with a better one and if possible replace Mr. Turner with Teacher Amit.

I'm sorry about your experience. If I may ask, why are you unsatisfied with Douglass Turner's teaching?

This is my experience:

Being a complete newbie, I have started the Swift iOS development track with Amit. Slowly but surely I was understanding all the Swift concepts presented by him.

Recently, I realized that it is a good idea to get familiar with Objective-C as it is the language that has been used for the past 6 years and all the Framesworks and APIs are created with this language.

Indeed, my experience with the Objective-C iOS development curriculum was not as "smooth". It is might so since the C language and Objective-C are not as straight-forward as Swift. But there is also the feeling that Prof. Douglass Turner does not take the time to digest and explain important aspects of the language which seem quite obvious to him but not so understandable to the newbie student. I have completed the first 3 stages in the Objective-C track (mainly learning the C language), and the journey with Prof. Turner has been quite confusing thus far. As I am done with the C portion, I am not sure whether I want to get into the actual Objective-C journey accompanied by prof. Turner.

This is my personal feedback. Really not trying to hate or anything. Being a TeamTreeHouse student for the past few months, I have takes various classes from HTML, CSS, Wordpress to iOS. Unfortunately, this chunk of the Objective-C track seems to be the hardest to understand.

Sorry to say this, but I'm totally agree...

im sorry but i agree two its really confusing.

im sorry but i agree two its really confusing.

Jason Anderson
Jason Anderson
472 Points

I've also found this particular part of the course to be suddenly very confusing. I'm not a total newbie, having a passable foundation in scripting languages and even some Object oriented ActionScript. The lack of explanation within the first five minutes of this first section of the course makes me wary of spending my time trying to 'push through' and think I might get better training elsewhere.

Also, the fact that the problems I'm encountering are echoed by so many other students going back over a year tells me that Treehouse doesn't want to fix the problem.

As this is the first track I've tried at Treehouse it again makes me wonder if I would do better taking training, and my training dollars elsewhere.

Abraham Juliot
Abraham Juliot
47,353 Points

Jason Anderson a new objective-c language basics course is scheduled to be released January 2016, this month.

13 Answers

+1 to this thread-- Like Michael Finney I came here after Turner completely switched to an implementation without warning at 5.23.

Overall, I find Turner to be much more assuming of my level of experience. He breezes over things, misspeaks, makes errors without pointing them out to us, I would much prefer to see Amit teach this course. After reading this thread, it's dissappointing that I'm essentially being told to turn elsewhere to learn this.

Jason Anderson
Jason Anderson
472 Points

I echo Becca's comments and I'm saddened to see that it was made a full 10 months ago but the problem with the training persists.

I agree this video jumped in to a bunch of stuff that had not been gone over so it was very confusing

Laurie Gray
Laurie Gray
23,119 Points

FOR ALL WHO ARE STRUGGLING WITH THIS COURSE:

(sorry for caps) I also was destroyed by this video and my hopes of learning Obj-C were wavering. However what you don't yet know is you just try to take in as much as he says here and keep going the rest of the course basically explains what is covered in this video; over and over again.

This clarifies everything and will make you feel like a coding GOD if you just keep going and you get a new teacher shortly who asks the questions your asking and is amazing at keeping you going!

Daniel Evans
Daniel Evans
5,105 Points

Yeah but I can't even get past the quiz. I'm gonna have to rewatch all the videos from this one until the quiz and write down all the syntax to use in the quiz even though it wont make any sense to me. I'm wasting a lot of time

Laurie Gray
Laurie Gray
23,119 Points

Hello Daniel,

Honestly the rest of the course talks about everything he discusses here. Obj C is taught in such a nice, digestible way after this. If you need to just skip the quiz or just type it verbatim to pass it and you'll come back in two days and it will be quite easy to grasp.

In fact they go into great detail about the alloc and init statements and explain absolutely everything several times with actual examples.

I know the syntax puts you off, but it doesn't get any harder than this for a few more courses so its like a trial by fire.

Hang in there my friend!

Daniel Evans
Daniel Evans
5,105 Points

Hey thanks you were right. I'm almost done the basics!

Despite being (mis)labelled as a beginner course, Objective-C Basics is a very advanced and technical course and is one of the most difficult ones on Treehouse in my opinion. C is a very low-level language, quite unlike PHP or Ruby or Python or even Swift. It's much harder to master, and many of its concepts are completely different.

What I'd recommend is to learn Objective C without taking the ObjC Basics course first, then return to it for a more in-depth introduction. When I took the course, I found it very challenging, but I was able to understand all the concepts taught in the videos. Perhaps after taking some other Objective-C courses, you'll be able to understand the language more.

michael finney
michael finney
229 Points

yes you are correct I am on the trial for both. Even with the very easy to follow guide on Lynda.com, when I come back to this I still fail the quiz. This is ridiculous and the fact that the instructor used the phrase "see it just works", well doesn't "just work" for me. Should one of my professors at the school that I pay to attend said that, I would withdrawal and take my money elsewhere. I guess the bottom line is that it is really frustrating to sign up for a tutorial site just to find out it is missing a key tutorial.

I feel the same way. Going from the previous lessons to this one, it's a huge step. It does not help one bit that the teacher is quickly switching back and forth, cutting and pasting at the speed he's doing it. It was suggested that I watch the entire video, without typing anything, and then only after that, re-watch again and follow along to help with my understanding, but there are little things in the video that interfere with understanding.

For instance, I am at 5:33 in the video right now (paused of course) and he has sphere.h selected on the left side of the screen. However, the document he is actually editing is sphere.m - check it out for yourself. This is of no help - certainly it confused me the first couple times I saw the video. Small thing, but for many it's a puzzling point in the video.

I don't think at all that a series of videos should be all I need - and I accept that I need to be reading books too - but this particular video has problems. I'm reading the Big Nerd Ranch book on this topic, and that helps.

I suggest a re-recording, into two videos if necessary.

Laurie Gray
Laurie Gray
23,119 Points

If you skip this video they spend the rest of the course and beyond explaining everything that was thrown at you here with no explaination. Honestly its so much easier after this youll be flying

I think a lot of the confusion revolves around the fact that he doesnt mention that he is going from his .h (header) file to his .m (method) file at 5:23. He just goes there instantaneously. If you dont realize he is doing that, it create an entire world of confusion. I had to rewatch this video 3 times to understand it..

If you just added one line, saying, now going to the .m file (@5:23) it would clarify things greatly.

After going through "The Big Nerd Ranch Guide" for Objective-C programming + taking Sam Allardyce's "Objective-C Essential Learning" video course (at Lynda), things are indeed a lot more understandable.

Yet, I would expect from an acclaimed company like TreeHouse to provide a more intuitive track for learning Objective-C.

Isn't it their pitch? from a complete newbie to become sufficient enough in any of the languages and courses provided here to hopefully land a job or start a business within the respective industry?

Just finding it a bit frustrating to create a trial account with Lynda or purchasing external source materials just to be in tune with the TreeHouse Objective-C development track with Douglass Turner.

If there was only a way to pass this message and common frustration along to TreeHouse's higher authorities.

In my above reply, I talk about why ObjC Basics, despite being labelled as a beginner course, is actually one of the most advanced courses on Treehouse. It's an extremely difficult course, and the teacher makes a lot of assumptions about the students learning the course. One cannot simply jump into the ObjC Basics course without having at least some prior experience with programming (which the other Treehouse courses provide).

Objective-C "Basics" should definitely be labelled as an intermediate level. So treehouse simply is missing a beginner Objective-C course.

Wondering if Amit Bijlani or whoever is in charge of iOS development is aware of it...

In the meantime, Sam Allardyce's Obj-C course at Lynda is a huge life-saver :)

michael finney
michael finney
229 Points

I agree, when he goes into implementation at 5.23 I have no idea what button he pushed or what even exactly all was changed. It was just a quick blip to him. I am going to try Sam Allardyce's Obj-C course at Lynda to see if I can catch up if not I will cancel this site before my first payment as there is no point in continuing if I have no idea what he is talking about.

Michael,

Make sure you take the "Objective-C Essential Training" and not the "iOS App Development Essential Training". Once I went through about 60% of the Objective-C Essential Training, the OBJ-C course here with Douglass Turner became a breeze.

I assume you are on trial period both now with TreeHouse and Lynda. I find TreeHouse to be a lot more intuitive and "easy-going" rather than Lynda (all the other courses and tracks that I took aside from Objective-C development were great). However if you are in it just for Objective-C iOS development, Lynda might be a better starter.

I know this is an old thread but I wanted to comment too incase Treehouse is still looking at it. The teacher in this course jumps around without explaining what he is doing. He uses keyboard shortcuts without telling us that he has used one, or what it is. In the Structs video (immediately previous to this one) he jumps around from line to line editing without explaining. I felt totally sure and confident in all the other courses I have taken on Treehouse but this teacher confuses me and I have struggled with confidence since I started having to learn from him.

Laurie Gray
Laurie Gray
23,119 Points

I'm going to be nice about this but I have digested so many courses in two weeks on here and yet I have spent around 6 hours on these two videos as the entire thing mystifies me. There is no outline, no explanation, no transition. How can we compare things to standard C when we have no idea what we're comparing?

I'm not expecting to be baby-fed, but I am looking for some explanation.

Daniel Evans
Daniel Evans
5,105 Points

This is crazy I don't even have a mac It was easy to follow along up until now with my Dev C++ and my C skills But this this is trash

I know this thread is quite old but I just thought I'd add in my two cents. From what it sounds like, the majority of people commenting here are taking Objective-C as their first programming language (although I could be wrong).

However if this is the case, I'd strongly recommend that you learn a different language (such as Java or Ruby) first. I encourage whoever feels like they're lost to take this approach since it'll strongly develop your understanding of programming languages and how they work in general (with much less complicated syntax). Obj-C in my opinion is far too advanced for a beginner or even someone who doesn't have a great deal of experience with object oriented languages

I personally have had no problem following along with the Obj-C basics course thus far. Coming from a C# and Java background, the Obj-C syntax is rather odd and somewhat puzzling at times, however since I have a developed understanding of object oriented languages it has made it easier to follow along and piece things together (point that I made above).

So if you're still reading this and struggling to a point, I recommend you try learning a language like Java first (or any other OOP language), understand how particular concepts work (i.e. classes, methods, interfaces, inheritance, etc) and then come back to learn Obj-C and I can tell you that the learning process will be much simpler :)

Josh Rubner
PLUS
Josh Rubner
Courses Plus Student 6,766 Points

The teacher clearly knows his stuff. Unfortunately, I don't and found this course increasingly more difficult as I went through. I still think there's a lot to learn here though - some of it has stuck.

I admit I glazed over a bit in Structs and guessed the quiz (100% BOOM!), but this isn't the way to go.

I know this course has been 'retired' but I still want to learn C because of where it can lead. It's like Latin for computers.

What's the Treehouse equivalent of this? -

http://www.lynda.com/C-tutorials/C-Essential-Training/164457-2.html

Josh

Laurie Gray
Laurie Gray
23,119 Points

Hey josh, I now develop in objective c everyday and learned initially on treehouse. The courses here are great after you get past the initial one. However, I believe you'd be investing your time much more wisely learning obj c rather than c as you'd be learning much of c anyway and it makes moving onto something like Java or swift much much easier. The demand for iOS developers is high and so much is still written in obj c.