Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

My business partner and I purchased this book to help us develop for the iPhone 3G. The first chapter was great and we thought this was the best book we had purchased out of 3. It wasn't until we got to the next few chapters that code wasn't working with what the book had written. We tried to redo the tutorials and the programs still did not function or would crash. Checking the downloadable code from the book site doesn't match what the author tells you to put in your program. This makes it hard to know if anything you did works or not and is very confusing for a beginner.

We found the errata website page and the book has tons of errors in almost all the chapters. We contacted Apress by phone and asked them if they were going to update the pdf file from the errors and they said they didn't have time. We then contacted the Author through the errata report link and this is what we wrote,

"You have written a beginners book and it would be real nice for you to update the PDF file so we as beginners could get a new version of the book without the vast errors. We have spent hours trying to debug your code, and get so frustrated that we move on to the next chapter. I think this is very simple for you to do as other publishers do this. Thanks"

His reply was this,

" I'm sorry - I agree with you, but this complaint needs to go to Apress - Errata goes to the individual authors, and we do our best to fix them when we become aware of them, but we are not the ones who maintain or update the PDF files."

So to bring this review to an end, Don't Buy This Book. It was a big waste of time and money. You will only get a book that is full of useless code looking for a quick buck with shady customer support.

I, like many others, bought this book simply because there really aren't any other iPhone SDK books on the market right now. It's a decent first book, but as someone who has programmed on the iPhone previous to reading this, I found some issues with it.

I DO recommend this book so far, as it really is the only one out there, and it does cover a lot of ground, but I feel that there will be much better books to come. I'd love to see a 2nd Edition of this.

THE GOOD:

- Current to iPhone 2.1
- Current to Objective-C 2.0
- Covers a wide area, such as Accelerometer, Swipes and Touches, Data Storage, Drawing, etc.
- Easy to read.


NEEDS WORKS:

- The author fails to show some useful shortcuts, such as putting all objects that need to be synthesized on one line: "@synthesize txtName, lblFileName, myViewController"

- They also seem to skip over some very basic areas, such as what do all the iPhone pre-built templates do? Instead, they say "Apple provides this for you, but we are going to build from the ground up". That is great, but ALSO cover the easier way and explain some differences between the easy/hard ways.

- They don't go deep enough into using and understand views. Sure, they go into navigation controller, tab bars, etc. but they don't explain enough on just basic view manipulation. The example of switching between two different colored views doesn't cover enough ground for something so important on the iPhone.

- I would have liked to see an "Advanced topics" as a final chapter. For example, how do I combine both a Tab Bar and a Navigation controller? Applications that are more than just very basic need a section going into some deeper topics. I do understand that this is a beginners book though.

- Skips over explaining basic concepts, such as what does "scalar" mean, how to view SDK headers to find methods (besides the documentation), and how you can right-click on an object in Interface Builder to bring up the connections pop-up.

Good book though 3.5 stars. Recommend it for beginners until a better book comes along.

This is a downright excellent book that fulfills exactly what you expect it to - teach beginning iPhone application development. Take the title in its most literal sense however; this is covers the "beginning", and is purely focused on iPhone SDK development. You will have to acquire elsewhere the Objective C, Cocoa, and Xcode skills required to produce the next killer app.

Each chapter covers a specific topic and by-in-large is not sequential; so it turns out to be a pretty good reference book.

The tutorials are manageable for the most part (things get heavy in the middle...), and provide a great balance between pedantry and practicality.

If you have no previous OS X desktop development experience, I would highly recommend Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition) - good Cocoa/ObjC knowledge is vital to a useful, AppStore-quality product.

This book (and iPhone dev in general) is accessible to anyone with a background in programming, and a great stepping stone for web developers (PHP/Ruby/Python) seeking to broaden their skills into the compiled world.

I don't have an app pulling $10k/day just yet, but if I ever do I probably owe it to this book.

This is the third book on iPhone development that I've read. It's head-and-shoulders better than the others. It's very readable and to the point. I really liked that you get exposed to some of "why" you should do it one way instead of the other instead of just "how".

While you get a solid introduction to using Interface Builder, you also get a much better introduction to some of the standard controllers that you can customize in code (e.g., UITableViewController) instead of relying on Interface Builder. The code examples are relevant and I never felt like I was doing a bunch of extraneous typing. If you've bought the book, you can also get an PDF version of the book for $10--which I found really handy.

Bottom-line: This a terrific introduction to iPhone development. It helps if you're already reasonable comfortable with Objective-C (I am).

I've only worked through the first few chapters and I already feel like I have the basis to make some simple apps. The author does not get bogged down in the technical minutia. Technical details are explained when necessary.
The book, so far, is well thought out and teaches you the right coding conventions and practices for the iPhone. There are lots of good tips and tricks for working in XCode and Interface Builder. Each chapter starts out with a high level explanation with screenshots of what the application you'll create in that chapter will do. It's like receiving a design spec and then creating the app from the design spec.
It's actually an enjoyable technical book! Part of the fun is being able to push your app to a tethered iPhone.