Big Nerd Ranch

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". 

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.