TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developerWelcome to the TUAW Holiday Gift Guide! We've sorted the treasure from the junk and are serving up suggestions to make your holiday gift-giving a little easier.
Chances are, if you're reading this post and this site, someone you know -- maybe you yourself -- has thought about learning to develop for iOS. For the person on your gift list who's got ambitions of coding the next Angry Birds, you can certainly pick out some items that will ease the path up to the mountaintop.
The biggest challenge for the gift-giver is knowing where to start; you've got to match the continuously variable levels of programming expertise that your recipient might have. From novices and noobs to l33t coders, we've got a list of presents that will challenge, educate and inform; even better, many of them are available in digital form for last-minute gifting, or overnight for Christmas Eve from Amazon or Apple (where there's free overnight shipping on orders of $50 or more). Some are even free!
The Basics
Needless to say, anyone who's diving into iOS development is going to need one thing first: a Mac. Whether it's the most affordable new machine Apple makes (the Mac mini), or a used machine (any Core 2 Duo-based Intel Mac will do), getting on the Mac is a prerequisite. Technically, you can do Objective-C development in GNUstep on Windows, but you can't run Xcode and build projects for iDevices without Mac OS X. We'll leave aside for the moment the question of whether doing development on a hackintosh is a worthwhile idea.
The Mac mini makes an excellent development machine; it's fast enough, unobtrusive, and it works with the keyboard and monitor your lucky recipient already has. Xcode does crave memory, though, so you're best off bumping it to at least 4 GB for an extra $100. If you're looking for a used machine, you can go with Apple's refurbished list, third-party resellers like Small Dog, or local used machines via Craigslist. The Xcode environment itself is completely free of charge, although a thoughtful giftgiver might download the multi-gigabyte installer on a fast connection and hand it over on a USB drive.Continue reading TUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developerTUAW's Holiday Gift Guide: For the would-be iOS developer originally appeared on TUAW on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 23:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.Source | Permalink | Email this | Comments
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