Jump start your Cocoa career at Beginning Cocoa Bootcamp in Germany, October 17-23, 2009

Big Nerd Ranch Europe, premier provider of innovative training classes for programmers, announced a new date for its widely popular combination for learning Objective-C and Cocoa programming: Beginning Cocoa Bootcamp, October 17-23, 2009. The seven-day class with instructor team of Matthias Fricke and Scott Ritchie will be held at the historic monastery "Kloster Eberbach" near Frankfurt, Germany, a location free of distraction.

Students signing up before September 12, 2009 qualify for the early bird price and save Euro 200.

The Beginning Cocoa Bootcamp is starting off with two days dedicated to learning Objective-C from instructor Matthias Fricke, followed by the renowned Big Nerd Ranch five-day Cocoa I Bootcamp, taught by Scott Ritchie.

"For a few years, I have felt that only one other person could possibly fill my shoes at the front of the classroom", commented Aaron Hillegass on Big Nerd Ranch instructor Scott Ritchie, "and he worked for Apple. Now he works for Big Nerd Ranch. I’ve known Scott for fifteen years, and I must admit that he knows Cocoa better than I do. And he knows iPhone development better than anyone. He is passionate about teaching and committed to making our students into effective and stylish Cocoa programmers. I am proud to announce that he is teaching the Cocoa Bootcamp and the iPhone Bootcamp for us."

The seven-day class in October provides the most comprehensive training available for Cocoa developers. It covers a wide spectrum of topics, from understanding the Objective-C language and lessons building on Cocoa fundamentals to more advanced topics that create a well-rounded Cocoa programmer.

After class, novice students will master the Objective-C language, the design patterns used in Cocoa and emerge fully skilled in the ability to develop complex applications for Mac OS X.

The first two days, taught by Matthias Fricke, are devoted entirely to teaching students Objective-C 2. This portion of the class is designed to be accessible to programmers without any experience in C or object-oriented programming. By the end of the two days, students will be fluent in Objective-C and be able to:

• Understand and work with classes, objects, methods, data types and expressions
• Use inheritance, take advantage of polymorphism and dynamic typing
• Use the preprocessor and basic control constructs for looping and decision-making
• Retain and release objects correctly to prevent memory leaks

Matthias Fricke has more than 15 years experience in Objective-C programming. He spent more than eight years in the US and worked in the last years at Apple as the Worldwide Training Delivery Manager.

The rest of the week builds on the foundation supplied by the Objective-C instruction and delves into Cocoa development.

The Cocoa portion of the class, taught by Scott Ritchie, promises to teach students how to write complex applications for Mac OS X 10.6 by:

• Mastering Interface Builder and Xcode 3
• Being able to find and understand the online documentation
• Understanding the most common classes in the frameworks
• Developing a clear understanding of the design patterns used in Cocoa
• Recognizing several common idioms of the Cocoa Community

Scott Ritchie started at NeXT in 1990. He has spent the last 20 years helping developers learn to use Objective-C and Cocoa, both as a trainer and as an engineer on Apple’s Developer Technical Support team.

The course requires no previous experience in coding with Cocoa and Objective-C, but students attending the bootcamp should be familiar with either a procedural programming language like C, Pascal, VB, or PHP or an object-oriented language like Java or C#. The primary text for the class is "Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X" by Big Nerd Ranch founder Aaron Hillegass. The class is taught in English on the latest releases of Mac OS X and Xcode with extensive attention given to Core Data.