Saturday, Nov 19, 2011    Text size: 

LOS ANGELES — Would you like to learn more about iOS 5 app development? Stanford’s newest iPhone and iPad applications courses are now available at iTunesU.

Apple’s wildly popular iPhone and iPad have captured the imagination of application developers, both mainstream and adult. For smaller shops coping with multiple platforms, however, obtaining and maintaining the required knowledge base can be a challenge — especially as major operating system and device capability changes alter the playing field — making the need for continuing education an important (as well as often expensive and time-consuming) commitment to the success of your business.

But Stanford is here to help.

One of the nation’s top centers of higher learning, Stanford University is world renowned for its bleeding edge technical programs. This indisputable level of authority makes its iOS 5 development programs the preferred starting point for anyone interested in mastering app development and marketing for Apple’s latest mobile operating system.

“Students may covet seats in Stanford’s popular iPhone and iPad application development course, but you don’t need to be in the classroom to take the course,” Sarah Jane Keller wrote for Stanford Report. “Anyone with app dreams can follow along online.”

And you can do it for free.

While Keller says online learners will hear the same lectures as classroom students, they will not receive Stanford credits or access to the instructors. For most busy adult app developers, however, just having the competitive advantage this information will provide is motivation enough to carefully review the video series.

Keller notes that the iOS 5 version of iPhone Application Development on iTunes U explores the newest and most talked-about features of Apple’s latest operating system — including iCloud integration, streamlined notifications, and wireless syncing.

Keller advises that developers unfamiliar with Apple’s operating systems must learn a new programming language, Objective-C, if they hope to complete the iOS 5 app course.

“Stanford students take a year of computer science classes and learn the technique of object-oriented programming before tackling the iOS development class,” Keller wrote, adding that “the two Stanford prerequisite courses, Programming Methodology and Programming Abstractions, are also available on iTunesU.”

The course is available now.

“There’s something about developing for the iOS platform that’s really exciting and fun because it runs on devices that everybody has in their purses or pockets,” Instructor Paul Hegarty stated. “There aren’t a lot of courses you can take that when you get to the end, to your final project, you can take it out of your pocket and show your friends.”

Reportedly receiving more than 10 million views, the iOS 5 development courses are the most popular download on Stanford’s iTunes U site.

“I don’t think that what I’m doing is just teaching [students] programming,” Hegarty added. “It’s an opportunity to teach them some computing fundamentals in a real world environment.”

All website operators or app marketers, regardless of whether or not they are involved in the actual development and coding of their products, should at least have a familiarity with “computing fundamentals in a real world environment,” providing further incentives to review this video series.