Big Nerd Ranch Europe, premier provider of intensive classes for Mac and iPhone programmers, web developers and system administrators, has added a class for the serious Cocoa developer. The training company, which has built a reputation for educational excellence in recent years, identified a growing need for advanced level classes for Cocoa developers. To meet that need, Big Nerd Ranch has developed the beginners Cocoa I and the advanced Cocoa II Bootcamps, with the first Cocoa II Bootcamp in Europe scheduled for November 9 - 13, 2009.

"For the past eight years, we have taught countless Cocoa training classes for developers with an interest in Cocoa coding with an intensive week-long accelerated approach that brings virtual novices to becoming confident Cocoa developers," said Aaron Hillegass, Big Nerd Ranch founder and president. "However, in that time, Cocoa has increased its sophistication and complexity of tools and capabilities, resulting in increased pressure on Cocoa developers to adopt new skills in order to remain competitive."

The new Cocoa II class provides the framework for Mac OS X developers with prior experience in Cocoa, or who have already taken Cocoa Bootcamp, to take their existing abilities to the next level. "Many of the developers who have taken our Cocoa Bootcamp, even from two or three years ago, have expressed a need to further refine their skills to fully integrate recent enhancements into their application development," Hillegass continued.

The class builds on the Cocoa I Bootcamp syllabus and provides even more in-depth Cocoa training on advanced features like integrating custom text into applications, and supporting Spotlight, Quick Look and AppleScript. The syllabus also includes, but is not limited to:

• Authoring an Apple Help book
• Delivering applications with Package Maker
• Using the Sparkle framework to deliver automatic updates to an application
• Using more Core Graphics, Core Image, and Core Animation
• Building an application that renders OpenGL graphics and implementing a 2-dimensional slider control
• Building a status item for the menu bar and control its default behavior with a custom system preference pane
• Using advanced-level features of Interface Builder
• Integrating C++ code in a Cocoa application
• Improving your code by using independent or dependent unit tests
• Analyzing Cocoa code with LLVM/CLANG instead of GCC
• Using Distributed Objects for interprocess communication

Students are expected to be comfortable with Objective-C and the Cocoa framework to the level described in the Cocoa I Bootcamp syllabus at http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes/cocoa_i.shtml .

Cocoa II instructor Juan Pablo Claude has a strong background in software development using C, C++, Objective-C, and Python, dating back to the days earning his Ph.D. and becoming a professor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. In his research, Juan Pablo often had to write data acquisition analysis programs. After spending several years in academics, Juan Pablo decided to make a career out of computers. He joined the Big Nerd Ranch in late 2005 as a Cocoa and Django programmer and instructor. Juan Pablo teaches his classes in English, he also speaks French and Spanish fluently.

Read more about Cocoa II Bootcamp, including the complete syllabus, at http://www.bignerdranch.com/classes/cocoa_ii.shtml or our instructor Juan Pablo Claude at http://www.bignerdranch.com/instructors/claude.shtml .