Talk about serendipity. My friend Samuel Goodwin and I were discussing the importance of coding standards last weekend and this Monday morning I received an email from one of my students asking for recommendations on just this topic. Luckily, Apple has created documentation that covers it well: Coding Guidelines (developer.apple.com) include suggestions on acceptable and preferred naming conventions. While there, also take a look at Cocoa Design Patterns (developer.apple.com).
So, why would you want to follow coding guidelines? Isn't it usually something that developers in large organizations need? What about independent freelancers?
As a software developer, you will likely collaborate with others, even when working on your own project. At the very least, you will collaborate with one person: yourself in the future. Be kind to that girl or guy. What you're writing now may "get-the-job-done", be sufficiently clear, "good-enough", etc. However, will you still understand what you wrote two weeks from now? six months from now?
The coding guidelines help tremendously in this regard. Following generally accepted naming conventions can allow somebody to understand the purpose and meaning of various methods, functions, properties, classes, etc. Clarity and consistency will help somebody quickly learn the new API.
A good example is the UICollectionView in iOS 6. Even though it's brand new and introduces a slew of other supporting classes, it's easy to understand for somebody with iOS development experience. In many ways it is similar to UITableView: it follows the delegate and data source patterns, it reuses cell views, etc. So, while it introduces a lot of new functionality that didn't exist before, it is relatively easy to get up and running with it.
So, study the coding guidelines, learn to speak the "native language", and enjoy producing fantastic applications, which you won't be afraid to maintain once they become mega-hits on the App Store.
