If you’re interested in learning how to code for the iPhone and the iPod touch, here’s your big chance — and it’s free to boot. Stanford School of Engineering has just launched today a 10-week online course that’s open to the public.

iPhone Application Programming begins today, and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting. You’ll also be able to pick up slides of the class at the same time.

“There’s a lot of interest in the iPhone,” says Brent Izutsu, Stanford’s project manager for Stanford on iTunes U. “This course provides an excellent opportunity for us to show the breadth and depth of our curriculum and the innovation of our students.”

Online viewers of the Stanford course will see the same lectures as the on-campus students, but will not receive credit for the course. Some of the student-developed apps from the fall-quarter class, such as the Chinese-English dictionary Qingwen, are now available at the iTunes store.

“For Stanford, working with Apple allowed us to focus our energy on identifying and capturing great content while Apple provided us the technology to distribute it globally,” Izutsu says.

iPhone Application Programming has some prerequisites, as do many college courses. You’ll need an Intel-based Mac, so you can install the software development kit. You don’t need to own an iPhone or iPod touch, although it would help.

Stanford on iTunes U strongly recommends that you’re comfortable with programming C, especially general C memory management. The class instruction will focused on programming for the current 2.2.1 OS.

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category: Breaking News