Big Nerd Ranch

Without a doubt, I highly recommend BNR's iOS Essentials with Swift course.  As an experienced developer that was looking for a springboard into iOS / Swift, this course was great.  During the course of the program, we were exposed to important topics on iOS and Swift and were encouraged to think outside of the box and ask questions beyond the course material.  At the end of the course, I had not only a large portfolio of working code examples, but also experience and knowledge beyond what could be found in just the book.

Location and ammenities were great as well.

Helpful hints: 1) Make sure to be fully focused on the training while there.  Do your best to avoid work emails, etc, unless required.  2) Have a project or idea to play around with during office hours in the evening.  This is a great way to expand on the knowledge you have learned on a daily basis and will allow you to ask questions beyond what is covered in class, and the instructors will be helpful in answering your questions.

I've attended the Android course as well, and it was great.  Really looking forward to the Kotlin course in May!

I had the wonderful opportunity to be in the first group of students for iPhone programming bootcamp, what is known now as iOS Essentials.  Joe Conway and staff were great instructors, and the material helped me understand where Apple was going with app development.  

This bootcamp was many years ago, but it served as my entry into Objective C programming for the Mac.  I had been to a 1 day short course at WWDC a couple years before and in return I came out for the week long course.  It was a good environment including good food and new friends.  

I still feel that going back now would be useful to level up to the state of the art.

I really enjoyed the pacing and difficulty level of the course.  It was billed as an advanced course and it really delivered. But if you had the prerequisite knowledge and experience it was not too challenging. I've been to many similar courses and/or conferences where the content didn't really match what was promised.  The projects were really well chosen and allowed to me cover skills and technology I was aware of but had never found time to learn. I think we've all been to the -- 5 hours of content crammed into 20 hours of delivery type experience.  This is not that!  Great instruction. Great materials.  I just can't say enough about BNR.  Have been buying their books for longer than I can remember -- and I buy pretty much every one of their iOS dev books regardless -- but it was so much better to 'meet the man' as it were.

Course was amazing, instructors were amazing, the location (Stone Mountain GA) was amazing!  I can't praise this group (Big Nerd Ranch) or the location enough.  The instructors presented the material in a very easy to consume manner, we're extremely knowledgable and made themselves available long into the wee hours of the night for labs, questions, discussions and anything else we could throw at them.  The location was outstanding with excellent accomodations, snacks, drinks, in general there was enough food to feed a small country and it was provided throughout the day.  We were writing apps by day 3 and covered enought of the iOS and Swift framework to build apps with the most commonly used features in apps today.  We've sent other developers to this same course and will continue to send developers to BigNerdRanch courses.

I would highly recommend this course (or any course taught by BigNerdRanch) to others!

My background - I had about 7 years of Software Development experience out of which 3 years I had been working on developing iOS Apps with Objective-C. I took a break for about couple of years from iOS development and software altogether and wanted to get updated with Swift and iOS 9. Big Nerd Ranch (BNR) Guides have been the gold standard to anything apple and I thought I would be able to come to pace by doing an intensive week long bootcamp. I would not say I achieved 100% of what I had planned for.

The course starts on a weekend (Saturday). You arrive to the facility on Previous Night (Friday) and have dinner with the instructor (Mine was Scott Ritchie) and other attendees. I was a Asilomar Conference Grounds CA and it was a great campus. Scotts a great guy to hang out with. He has worked with Apple in its glory days (pre-iPhone) and loves to share stories about his encounter with Steve Jobs. He has good knowledge of how Apple Development team and hence the software written have evolved and how it affects the current development ecosystem. Also he is well networked with todays app developers so can definitely share pragmatic tips about app development. He was very attentive towards all student queries and also was kind enough to chat about anything related to iOS development and even stuff outside of it. He knows the area in and out and makes sure everybody is comfortable even after hours. He drove me to supermarket as I did not have a car and need urgent shaving supplies which I had forgotten to pack and made margaritas for us for one of the camp fire labs.

Let me get to the point about the course.

Pros
- Very comfortable stay (I would say over comfortable. I would not mind to pay less and settle for a little less lavish and more functional stay during 7 days).
- Instructor was a great guy to hang out with.
- People are mostly friendly and helpful and the batch is small so Instructor does get a chance to work with everyone.
- After course, camp fires, wine nights, labs with camp fire and margaritas (shh) and beach walks between the course were fun.
- You could meet a lot of interesting people working in valley. We had people from Netflix and couple of them from Apple (though they were in stealth mode), Intuit, Black Pixel, 3M. Great bunch to network and hang around with.

Cons
- Pace - I found the program to be a little fast even with iOS programming background I had. I highly recommend to go through the entire book (BNR's iOS and Swift Guide) so you have enough time during the bootcamp to go into further details. You will learn the most if you do all the labs and ask questions when you are stuck or a concept you are not understanding. 
- Screen - BNR should provide a bigger and better screen. There was constant adjustment/focus/scrolling going on and I though it affected the flow of the instructor.
- Meals provided by the facility will get to you in 3-4 days. So plan to explore the surrounding areas.
- Connectivity is very bad. Could be a pro as it keeps you focussed on the course and gives you enough rest but the rooms and facilities are ok for the price.
- Biggest point I thought that they can work on is include more practical areas that are used in today's apps. I was surprised to see things like Push Notifications and use of Networking Libraries skipped. I would say these things are essentials rather than advanced topics. 

Objective-C/Cocoa Bootcamp is an intensive seven-day training course specifically designed to provide a condensed and information-rich, hands-on introduction to Objective-C programming utilizing the Xcode development environment on the Macintosh platform. I enjoyed this experience very much and recommend it as one of the best ways to level up on MacOS application development. It truly is a "Boot Camp" experience. The Big Nerd folks provide great food, and posess deep insight into how to get all the right information crammed into you in only 7 days!

This 5-day class explores advanced iOS development topics and will teach you how to maximize the performance of your new and existing iOS applications. Prepare your brain for an influx of Swift and iOS programming knowledge.

What you'll learn

• Various tools for document-based and multithreaded architecture
• Create iOS extensions
• Record video, process barcodes and synthesize speech using AVFoundation
• Create custom animations for transitions between view controllers
• Take advantage of unit testing
• Create your own UIs with custom Layers and Core Graphics

Big nerd ranch is not cheap, but if you're serious about starting with a new technology, this is the place to go (short of spending hours learning online, which is also valid). The whole experience is worth the money, to a certain degree. You will learn whatever technology you're attending to learn, but be well rested and try to have a decent "base" before you go, their trainings are short (1 week max) and so they need to cramp a lot of information in those days. You don't want to waste 5000 dollars or more because "you're tired". 

I took this course in Monterey with Scott Ritchie. Scott is an amazing instructor. As a new developer he made the course easy to follow and used lots of real examples. I also really enjoyed the walks he took us on during breaks, it gave us a chance to enjoy some of the lesser explored areas on the beach. The conference center is in such a unique location that it makes the entire experience very enjoyable, to the point that you forget you are spending 10+ hours in the class room a day.

The Big Nerd Ranch program was extremely useful for my learning Swift and iOS UIKit APIs. Combining the fast-paced bootcamp with the unique environment made it especially enjoyable. The Monterey location gave us access to great walks around the campus. I thorougly enjoyed this program and would take additional programs to further my learning from Big Nerd Ranch in a heartbeat.

I attended the advanced iOS dev bootcamp.  They covered many of the most important, but sometimes overlooked features in iOS.  We also did a deeper dive into some of the core parts of iOS that have been invaluable.  I would highly recommend Big Nerd Ranch for any training needed.  The instructors are personable, knowledgable, and approachable.

I took a course on Cocoa several years ago in Germany, and it was a great experience.  Aaron is an excellent teacher, the materials are very well put together, and the peers in the course were very fun to talk with and plan projects with.

This course also eventually led me to start my own small business, largely focused on iOS development.  This was hugely successful and the course paid for more than itself several times over.

As a software tester making the jump to developer, I already knew a lot about certain aspects of iOS development, like provisioning and Human Interface Guidelines. But learning APIs by reading Apple's class references wasn't teaching me how to be a good developer. 

Mikey's course offered a good mix of technical info and stylistic advice. He fielded both basic and advanced questions with deep knowledge and respect. 

The retreat setting made it easy for me to focus on practicing the material without distractions of a usual work week. 

When I took the course, it was a bit of an awkward mix of Swift and Objective-C, but realistically, so are most real world iOS development projects right now. 

The BNR boot camps are worth every penny and then some. The lectures expand so much on what is in the book and the conversations that arise during the course are perhaps even more valuable than the lectures and lab time. I learned so much more than what was in the syllabus. I was able to have an app I wrote while in the class code reviewed by the instructor and that alone was worth the price of admission. I learned about how to think about coding an iOS app and not just the syntax of a language or the nuances of an API. Being able to continue to ask questions and have conversations with both the instructors and classmates in the forum after the class has ended has helped immeasurably. I would go to any boot camp BNR offers because the instructors are incredible and the courses are amazing. 

Great instructor with very relevant information & lab practices. The bootcamp environment take away distractions and builds a teamwork environment that bonds not only with the instructor but with our fellow students. I highly recommend this type of training and the Big Nerd Ranch has always the latest and cutting edge training for software developmnent. I am a proud Alumni.