Customer Reviews

Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

5 star:		(43)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

First, I like Apress books, I have many.

If you are starting out with iphone development and do not come from an Objective-C background, you may want to hold back on buying this book. It will teach you Objective-C. But it will get you to rely on using the Interface Builder(IB) for all your interface stuff. After going this route for a couple months I now realize that I hate Interface Builder. So I'm reading books that teach coding the interface and find that it is much faster.

If you buy the book you will see how the author tries to politely say that the IB is ok at some stuff and terrible at other stuff. For the most part it is only worth using IB if your iphone app meets one of two requirements. It closely resembles an example from this book or one of the predefined iphone templates when you start a new project in Xcode is all you plan on needing. If you want to do more complicated things with multiple views with multiple types of navigation, this book will lead you down a path of trying to make something work that was never setup to work that way.

Bottom line, if you are a programmer that's written a lot of code, created a lot of interfaces and can code your way out of a paper bag, this book is not for you. You will buy it, like it (because it IS a good book) but then feel like you got the pre-school version of what you are looking for.

Anyone that is interested in making complex interfaces on the iphone will find that they end up working just in code and then rarely, possibly never, opening IB for anything. If you want a good book to start, get the iPhone Developer's Cookbook by Erica Sadun. It does not teach IB, it does not teach Objective-C (but you'll pick it up). It teaches you how to build iphone apps the way a real programmer expects to build apps.

If you want to learn how to build simple iphone apps that barely do anything and almost the entire process is drag and drop, get this book. It will teach you that well, but as soon as you want to start to do more complicated things, everything this book taught you will end up holding you back.

This book is great. However if you have never programmed before, You first need to check out Apress' 'Learn C on the Mac'. Then you should read Apress' 'Learn Objective-C on the Mac'. After that you are ready for this book and will be making your very own professional apps in no time! Remember, this book is third in a series, so if you have very little knowledge in programming, start from the beginning. It is better to learn to walk before learning to run.

Good book, however it lags behind Apple Software Development Tool Kit (SDK). Book's figures are no longer relevant, which makes it difficult to follow. I also purchased "Learn C on the Mac" by same author and publisher and had the same experience. All due to new version of SDK.

All in all I thought this book was somewhat helpful. The author's writing style makes a fairly dry subject more enjoyable. The progression through the book makes sense with each chapter adding onto the previous with ever more complex apps. And they do cover a lot of the most important controls and paradigms of standard iPhone apps.

However, the problem with this book is the same problem I see with a lot of resources covering iPhone development--they are far too shallow. They explain the steps required to write the apps fine but they don't give you any idea about what's really going on. Nothing about the architecture and methodology. Type this, click that, drag the blue line from here to here. You end up with a working iPhone app but you don't really have any idea how you got there or how you would create another. Any monkey can follow simple instructions! I want to know how all this stuff relates and fits together! To reuse a tired analogy, this book just hands you the fish instead of teaching you how to fish.

So I'll keep looking for other resources. I think I've gotten a reasonable introduction to how this stuff works on a very shallow basis, but I'm frustrated by having read a good majority of this book and still not understanding what I'm doing.

If your completely new to iphone developing I suggest you skip this book. With every SDK update these books become instantly outdated if you depend on them to give you word for word, line by line help. As soon a you run across a section of the book that is no longer current like the last line on page 133 your screwed. I'm new to all this so i'm pretty ignorant on Objective C and everything else that has to do with programming. Out of the three tutorials in this book I went thru so far I only got one to work. I copied word for word the code as they show in the book..only to get a half a dozen errors, which immediately stopped me from progressing in that chapter. I would love to see someone come out with a book that actually has a technical support number that you can call (at a reasonable cost..say $100.00 for unlimited support for 6 Months) This is the only way I could have someone help me when I hit a road block. As soon as Apple changes one page in their SDK software and your following along in this book, its like coming to a canyon and the bridge is gone. With no help in site. I'm going to be looking for an online class to take or a community college course to take some where...I need hand holding.

I'm not one to complain about typos since we are all human and we make mistakes, but when its comes to a programming book and running some of the examples in the book, then that's a whole different ball park. I ran into some compile errors when running their projects, almost spent an hour on a coding error and figured out the authors' left out some code to run the program(s). Heck, I even got their code (which you can download off their site) and even that had errors and couldn't compile-run (no joke). My other complaint would be is the book did not have any programming exercises at the end of each chapter. I was expecting some mini-exercises, but there wasn't any.

With that said, this book is written quite well and easy to read, the authors don't use any big words that the average person wouldn't understand. It helped me understand Objective-C 2.0 a little better. I would wait for a revision to come out before buying this book, though.

In my opinion a very good first iPhone book. This book doesn't cover objective-c or basic programming at all, not that it should. It does presents basic iphone development strategies in a very clear manner. Topics covered include: and introduction to Xcode and Interface Builder, implementation of common UIKit controls, and basic iPhone development best practices. I am an interactive developer, who has taught himself multiple web and interactive technologies.

I'm almost through this book (update for SDK 3) and I'm loving it. It is such a contrast to the iPhone Programming: Big Nerd Ranch Guide. While the content in both books tackle most of what you'd want to know to start developing your apps, Mark and LaMarche's book is just a whole class above in organization, clarity of explanations, and attention to detail both in code and guiding you through it.

One of the main things that helped me was the consistent organization of methods in the class by use of #pragmas, keeping your protocol methods together helped me become familiar very quickly with what I needed to do, eventually without having to look at the code in the book anymore.

For example, chapter 9 tackles dealing with Navigation Controllers; every example Mark begins coding your IBAction methods first, then your UIView methods, Table Data Source Methods, Table Delegate Methods, so on and so forth. By the end of the chapter you know exactly what to do for every view you build.

The language is clear and written in a friendly tone, without distracting from the main content.

If you're new to Objective-C/iPhone Development, you can't go wrong with this one.

I found this book invaluable in learning the iPhone SDK ... highly recommended! Helped me immensely in getting my first iPad app into the store on launch date.

I got this for my iPhone Development class and it's been great. We started with Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) which gave us an introduction to Objective-C so that was less of a barrier and we could focus more on learning the iPhone SDK with this book. The example programs get you making some simple but good apps and are great reference points for basic elements for a variety of app types. You'll learn what you need to get started and it's nice to have reference code for whenever you need it, buy it for yourself but feel free to share it with anyone interested in giving app development a shot!