Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
by Dave Mark, Jeff LaMarche
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dave Mark, Jeff LaMarcheBrand: Apress
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2008-11-21
ISBN: 1430216263
Number of pages: 536
Publisher: Apress
Product features:
- Apress Beginning iPhone Development: Exporing the iPhone SDK
- Are you a programmer looking for a new challenge? Does the thought of building your very own iPhone app make your heart race and your pulse quicken? If so, then Beginning iPhone Development is just the book for you.
Book Reviews of Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
Book Review: THE Book to Learn iPhone Programming, but nothing on network I/O??
Summary: 4 Stars
I have The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK (Developer's Library), the yet-to-be-released beta PDF of iPhone SDK Development, and this book on my desk. While the iPhone SDK Development book is as yet unreleased, I won't formally issue any opinions on that book (and this is the wrong place to do that, anyways). Thus far, I believe Dave and Jeff's work on "Beginning iPhone Development" is hands-down THE book to use if you want to learn iPhone development, and they've set the bar pretty darn high for future books presently being authored.
Dave and Jeff do an incredible job in the first 52 pages of the book explaining the nuances and idiosyncrasies of the XCode and Interface Builder development environment. I only wish I had their first 52 pages to help me when I started on my own iPhone development journey. As an experienced Java and .NET developer, I found XCode and Interface Builder with their dozens of different tools windows to be foreign, arcane, and difficult to navigate. While I now feel more then comfortable with these Apple tools, I could only shake my head and chuckle, saying to myself "Where was the first 3 chapters of this book about 2 months ago when I needed it most!"
One thing to keep in mind is that Apple's iPhone SDK is an evolving thing, and in my experience these early books were printed well before the 2.2 release shipped, which did indeed change some things. Later books that are still in beta will have the benefit of being slightly more accurate with documented Apple best practices and more in-tune with Apple's changes. That isn't to say that this book should be avoided or that the code samples don't work; on the contrary- if you've never used any of the Apple tools before and plan on entering the iPhone application development frenzy, buy this book; the time you'll save from reading just the first 10% of the book is worth every penny!
While there are some common examples between The iPhone Developer's Cookbook and this book, one example really stood out to me. Implementing a Search Bar in the Cookbook was glossed over- the sample worked, but I felt it had lots of holes. In contrast, this book presents a logical and well-written section that covers 15 pages, including insight on deep mutable copies, the apparently new Objective-C 2.0 feature "fast enumeration" (a for loop Java and C# folks will be comfortable with, i.e. for (id key in keys) is the example they cite), etc.
The only area that I was particularly disappointed in was the lack of I/O coverage offered in a 500 page book. Phones are mobile, yet the Internet is always just a step away. That is, after all, one of the things that make a truly compelling iPhone application. Just look at the commercials Apple runs showing leading applications that give you insight on where to dine and what song is playing on the radio. In almost every case (the exception perhaps in games), Network and File I/O are key components of the application. As an example to back up my point, the book's index doesn't even index the word "network" or "Internet" or "Web" (unless you count "web sites, coding advice" at the end of the book). The index states that NSURL (a class used to access a URL) is only found on a single page, page 334. On page 334, the end of a sentence about persistence reads ", which means that classes like NSURL, UIIMage, and UIColor cannot be used directly." This glaring omission was the biggest disappointment that I ran into. The other books I cited both spend (or appear to plan on spending) considerable time on I/O, with one providing a recipe to "Build a Simple Web-Based Server" (yes, that's your iPhone running as a server!). For this reason, it is probably necessary to supplement this book with one of the other books I cited.
All in all, I believe the book earns a 4 star rating. I simply can't give it 5 stars because networking is so important to mobile applications (how did this get lost along the way??). The writing style of the authors is easy going, yet highly instructional. Definitely THE book for true beginners who are new not only to the iPhone platform, but to all Apple developer tools as well.
Summary of Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK is the second beginning level book from Apress that is written for developers who want to program Apple?s iPhone, this time focusing on how to take advantage of the powerful new SDK that Apple are due to release in the second half of 2008.
So while our first book (Beginning iPhone Application Development 978-1-4302-1051-1) was a general introduction to application development on the iPhone with general introductions to the tools of the trade such as Objective-C, the platform APIs and developer tools, this second book focuses specifically on the new iPhone 2 SDK, which will give developers new ways to create experiences for iPhone users.
Readers will discover how to create programs for the iPhone using Apple's official Software Development Kit (SDK). Readers will learn to design user interfaces using Apple's Interface Builder tool, starting with simple interfaces and progressing to complex, professional-quality multi-view applications. Using a practical step-by-step approach, the readers will see how to implement common iPhone application interfaces and learn about about the Model-View-Controller approach to programming used throughout the iPhone SDK. Readers will also see how to interact with the user through the iPhone's multitouch screen as well as learn how to save data using the iPhone's file system and the embedded SQLite database. The book is packed with information and code samples showing how to exploit all the goodness of the new SDK from the iPhone's built-in accelerometer to the built-in camera and everything in between.
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