I am thoroughly in love with BNR.
And I've never heard of About Objects until today, but they look solid. So I'm biased! With that mind, here was my experience with BNR:
I'd spent the majority of my programming career dealing with PHP, Perl, PL/SQL... scripting languages. I hadn't had to touch C++ since somewhere around '94, and being that my brain is a particularly useless sieve, that stuff has LONG been forgotten.
I've survived (and flourished, even!) acquiring skills on my own as needed, and when it came time to dive into ObjC for iPhone development, I picked up Aaron's book on Cocoa programming to get a feel for it... and while it's a fantastic guide (and widely considered to be THE bible of OS X programming), I was feeling overwhelmed and felt it was time to take the next step and enroll in a proper course.
This was back in '08, and a quick search revealed BNR to be the only real option for that sorta thing, so I enrolled in their iPhone course... for some reason the logistics for the Atlanta course didn't work out (it was either sold out or a month or two later than I'd wanted wait, being the impatient chump that I am), so I ended up signing up for the course in Germany.
I was paying for it out of pocket, and they were REALLY patient with me as I monkeyed about with my payment, and once that was confirmed, they handled everything else. You just give 'em a flight number and that's that. Stefanie was waiting at the airport, scooped up another classmate and took us to the monastery. Yeah, I said it. Monastery. But more on that in a bit.
My classmates had very different programming backgrounds... a few heavy C guys (experienced, not fat!), some Java folks, and a few people just like me. I was a bit anxious about that but it proved to not be an issue at all. Alex von Below was the instructor, and he's fantastic. As I recall, the course material was basically a rough draft of what is now the BNR book on iOS development... and every day we'd just tackle a chapter or so, with Alex filling in any gaps and helping us explore related topics. I'm probably not doing it justice at all, but some key takeaways for me were:
- Pacing was NEVER an issue. I never felt like I was holding the rest of the class back, despite my lack of significant OOP experience.
- The classes were structured to be very low pressure... you can get as much or as little out of it as you need or want... Alex was quite willing to do deep dives on more esoteric things individually, or to the whole class if we were all interested.
- Classmates were fantastic... very communal, everybody was happy to help one another... hell, even I answered a few questions!
Anyway, back to the monastery. Turns I paid a couple grand of my own cash to hang out in a monastery for a week. Or former monastery, I should say... it's a hotel/winery now, and it's GORGEOUS.
Meals are all included and the food was really quite excellent, and they were very accommodating of my vegetarian diet (although I suspect they found it rather amusing!).
The setting is REALLY conducive to learning... very quiet, no distractions... breakfast, a few hours of instruction, lunch, more class, then we'd take hikes around the winery grounds, some more class, dinner... you get the picture.
In hindsight, it clearly makes sense, but it never occurred to me at the time how key the setting was going to be in getting me to focus. I've not been to the Atlanta ranch yet, but I'm dying to! At this point, the idea of spending a week in an office park trying to cram knowledge through my thick skull gives me the hives.
Bottom line for me is this: I have the attention span of a 3-year old, and for me, BNR was more of a retreat than just a course. A week-long vacation in Europe wherein somehow I walked away with a solid understanding of Cocoa and iPhone development too. I'm incredibly happy with the experience, and they have an alumni mailing list where we can post any esoteric Cocoa questions to our classmates and instructors.
Oh, and the cheesiest part? I even made friends! ME!
