Apparently you only get it free if you're going through Product Hunt. Somewhat irritating, as I'd like to avoid going to Product Hunt whenever possible.
I'd learn Objective-C if you have any intention of trying to be employed doing iOS. There's going to be a ton of legacy code, and any apps developed from 2008-2014 will have large Objective-C codebases, guaranteed. Swift is designed for interoperability with those codebases, so you'll need to know how to read and understand the legacy code for some time to come, even if Apple eventually deprecates Objective-C in favor of Swift.
If you're doing development for yourself or your own edification, though, you could totally skip Objective-C. It might be worth it to get an overview of the syntax so you can read StackOverflow answers and tutorials about Apple's APIs (which are by far the biggest part of learning iOS dev), but otherwise skipping straight to Swift should be fine.
I think Swift will take a little time to mature. Right now not only is the compiler buggy, Swift introduces some massive new functionality and style which will take time to propagate.
For better or worse, I think Swift is trying to play the same game as Scala—being just enough OO and just enough FP to get everyone on board. I think it's an exciting space (I'm personally quite convinced that OO and FP represent roughly dual things and that there's a happy medium somewhere) but it also means there will be a longish period as "Swift style" is developed and propagated.
So for all of those reasons, I think it's worth sticking with ObjC for a while unless you like a little bit of pain and want to be on the bleeding edge.
I'd say at this point either is fine. Swift is still changing a lot (breaking changes) and the open source ecosystem around it will be lacking for a while. Objective-c is mature with a good ecosystem around it. I've developed in objc for 6 years and learning the basics of Swift was simple for the sole reason that it's the cocoa API's which are important. Once you know them the language is just a different syntax for accessing the same features.
Swift was designed for beginners and in our experience it delivers. We (http://www.thinkful.com/) recommend Swift for beginners and the students in our Swift classes the last few months agree!
Announcing a $500/month price tag _after_ an email signup dripping with trackers is not so inspiring. Hopefully you teach better design practices in your lessons?
Hm. On the homepage the price is listed as part of the main description of the course. You're not the first to make this point – there's definitely something to it. We'll have to rethink appropriately. Surprises like this in funnels are not a winning strategy.
Of course, there are lots of iOS courses available, but Eliot Arntz is regarded as great instructor and this bitfoundation course looks solid to me. The free offers seems only valid through the producthunt website, so I had to link there and you have to click thru.
That's a good find! I registered with a "junk" email address after seeing this comment. Just a "view source" on the profile page shows the password in clear text.
@arntzel, @nicholjs, would you please fix this ASAP?
A good way to highlight the value/quality of the course; rather than just delivering the course for free, which can give the an appearance of cheaper quality.
Our course is more geared towards beginners but seeks to incorporate much of the depth available in the Stanford course. We also tried to break items down into smaller chunks then the 90 minute lectures in the Stanford course. Those with a CS background may find the Stanford course to be more their style since the instructor is world renowned teaching iOS.
