On Thursday, I continued to learn about programming in C through Harvard's online CS50 lectures and made a bit of progress in chapter 6 of Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK. More importantly, I was able to speak to Mr. Collias about my problems for the first time. We were unable to speak in person since he had been unwell earlier, but we were able to make some important advances in how effective communication could be established in the future. My specific questions could not be answered because of the inability to share code over the telephone. However, I was able to ask about the functionality of "pointers" and was able to suggest a way to use VNC, an open source remote desktop client so that sharing code would not be an issue in the future. I also sent Mr. Collias a copy of "The Objective-C Programming Language" annotated by myself so that some of my problems will be evident when I mee with him next.
The inability to get my questions answered meant that I was unable to progress much further in my textbook. While I could have written the sample application(s), this exercise would have been of little value without understanding. Nevertheless, I am happy to say that my questions will almost certainly be answered on Monday, when I will finally be able to meet Mr. Collias in person. We will also set up VNC and Skype to facilitate future conversations through voice over systems.
On Friday and Saturday, I spent most of my time flying and visiting Colleges, as mentioned before, but I was also able to continue my education. I progressed very far in the CS50 course because I had loaded all of the lectures and lecture slides to my iPhone before departing. I have now completed lecture weeks 0-4, and only 5-12 remain. Thus far I have reviewed the implementation of sorting algorithms, learned about the benefits of parallelism in computing, and educated myself on a great deal of programming syntax that is similar in C and Objective-C. Today (2/22/09) I will focus on my textbook to see if there is anything else I can do before my questions are answered tomorrow.
