I’ve been plugging along through the iOS Apprentice book from raywenderlich.com over the past few weeks. Let me say one thing: this thing is AMAZING.

RayWenderlich.com iOS Apprentice Book Synopsis

The iOS Apprentice is a series of epic-length tutorials for beginners where you’ll learn how to build 4 complete apps from scratch.

Each new app will be a little more advanced than the one before, and together they cover everything you need to know to make your own apps. By the end of the series you’ll be experienced enough to turn your ideas into real apps that you can sell on the App Store.

These tutorials have easy to follow step-by-step instructions, and consist of more than 900 pages and 500 illustrations! You also get full source code, image files, and other resources you can re-use for your own projects.

I started out by just signing up for the site’s newsletter. When you sign up for the newsletter, you get emailed the entire first full-length tutorial in the iOS Apprentice book for FREE. At first, I ignored the tutorial as I was focused on just grabbing what I needed from Googling, but I quickly became frustrated with the gaps in my knowledge.

I stumbled upon the RayWenderlich.com site tutorials quite often in my googling and saw that the site had some new Swift and iOS books coming out. I didn’t realize that the tutorial that I got for free with the newsletter sign up was actually the first of four chapters in the iOS Apprentice, and I was interested in buying the iOS Apprentice so I dug up the tutorial in my Gmail and decided to commit to going through it.

As soon as I made it through the first few pages, I knew this was going to be an amazing resource. I zoomed through the free tutorial and was hooked–I decided to bite and I actually bought the complete Mega Swift Bundle from RayWenderlich.com…that’s how sure I was that this was how I wanted to learn.

So as of today, I’ve completed the iOS Apprentice book–all 1,018 pages! I’ve learned so, so much, a lot of which is how to do iOS development in Swift the right way–not by hacking together a bunch of stuff I find online. My current unfinished app definitely has some ‘no-no’s’ in it that the book’s author, Matthijs, pointed out along the way that I’m going to have to go through and fix now that I know.

My next adventure: the RayWenderlich.com Core Data by Tutorials Book! To make my unfinished app work better, I need to get better at Core Data, so this will definitely help!

P.S.: I’m also making my way through the Swift Apprentice book bit by bit as I go along. Another great resource.