Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I have some very mixed feelings about this book. Let's start on a positive note. First of all, it is VERY well written. the authors don't just walk you through the answers they present in their projects, but also awaken your curiosity and walk you through the trial and error process that leads to their answer. some people say that this makes the book longer than necessary. i say that this makes them great teachers, since they know how to engage their readers and get you to understand not just what their solutions do, but why they have been implemented a certain way. my only qualm about their writing is that they spend a bit too much time explaining what they have done in the past and what they are going to do in the future instead of focusing on the lesson at hand.
I also got a lot of mileage out of the projects / code included in the book, especially the chapters on setting up your first two applications and the chapter on persistence.
Unfortunately, though, after reading this book it turns out i was not ready to make iPhone applications. i still ended up reading exorbitant amounts of documentation from apple to troubleshoot my code and do some very ordinary things. i found that apple's iPhone Application Development guide and Cocoa Fundamentals Guide had much more relevant data for learning how to make an iPhone application and are a better way to get started. i especially found that i needed to understand a lot more about how how my development environment manages resources, how events are handled and passed around (especially with regard to when to use actions vs delegates vs notifications and details on how these mechanisms work), memory management details, how an iPhone application works under the hood, how to interface between different languages and libraries, etc, etc.
The material in this book is great, but in the end, i would say that apple's introductory guides are what you need to get started, and this is just a supplement to them.
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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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