Just seen this pop up again so thought I would comment.
@Black Dynamite and Tilluss would it be ok if i Trust you some time?
My background was uni in the days when tables were still used for designs. Highlight was building a space invaders clone using Adobe Director. From there I went on to support, specifically Virtual Learning Envronments which I got really good at, this went hand in hand with E-learning but we then got made redundant.
Set up a company with a fellow and went into Network management ( as with most business with friends it failed ) so I know have my own company but in reality its just me.
So for half the week I'm more or less a Managed service provider for 2 schools. So network support, hardware recommendations etc. The rest of the week I look after our little one and do web sites and computer repairs.
I'm in a slight dilemma as currently I earn enough to live but would like more work. I thought I'd cracked this last month when I got invited to another school to pitch them a new network, however they went with a larger company as they were scared with it been a large project. This has made me question myself and what I need to do. With the price of computers and newer OS there is less things to go wrong for the general publics computers to fix or if not sometimes its cheaper for them to purchase a new one.
This is hard for me to type but sometimes I feel a bit of a fraud when I do websites as the majority of them are Wordpress sites, which I purchase a theme for and then mod them to fit the clients wishes. So I don't feel like a designer or developer just a modder.
I feel like I don't know where to concentrate my efforts. I used to know some PHP and produced a few Database sites from scratch. Also done a big c# entity framework site. Just started looking at Swift and iOS development on lynda.
I will warn you that it's not the easiest time to be getting into iOS development at the moment, Swift is still very new and evolving all of the time, and there are many years worth of Objective-C codebases that are still being used and developed. You can still do most stuff in Swift, but there will be times where you need to look through Objective-C code, or even do something in Objective-C that you can't yet do in Swift (but this is very rare), so just bare that in mind.
If you are looking for good resources for iOS development then
http://www.raywenderlich.com is a very good place to start, their training videos are well worth the $15 a month. And remember to check out the Swift language book by Apple, it's a great resource (
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/book/swift-programming-language/id881256329?mt=11).
What I would suggest is that after you get some basic learning done (a grasp of the language) you should come up with a project, sketch it out on paper before you even touch the code, and then attempt to create it from start to finish. Don't start off with anything too big, just something simple like a table that lists your friends and then tapping on one of the cells pushes to another view to show their details, that kind of thing. Doing something simple like that will help you to understand the basic structure of an app, the concept of delegates and table cell reuse etc. Keep making small simple projects and making them harder and harder for yourself like showing images, animating a button when you tap it, making a network request to download some data (
https://www.apple.com/itunes/affili...tion/itunes-store-web-service-search-api.html) and keep progressing from there.
Remember, it's not about knowing exactly how everything works off the bat, it's more about knowing that something exists so you can look it up when you need to use it at a later date. If you do that then you will naturally progress and things will click into place, rather than getting bogged down in the finer details right away.
Here are some other resources, they can be quite advanced but it's good to have the links for when you are ready in the future:
http://www.objc.io/issues/ - Very in depth look at very general topics, generally written by experts in the respective subjects.
http://nshipster.com - Small articles on very specific subjects.
