Customer Reviews

Cocoa Touch for iPhone OS 3 (Developer Reference)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I'm an experienced iPhone developer with 5 apps in the App Store. I've been making a living as an independent iPhone developer for over a year. I know how to write iPhone apps, yet there is some much to know. This book helps developers with all the the important Cocoa Touch APIs and give useful examples on how to implement the APIs. I use this book as a reference for all the new 3.x API that I haven't had time to dig out of the Apple documentation. The book explains what the API does and why I care. I have already used the contents of this book to implement copy and paste and develop my own button animations.

I have many iphone programming books and never paid this book much attention. recently though, i have been trying to get a deeper understand of the inner workings of cocoa touch. this book is amazing, its really made me understand the MVC approach used when building iphone apps. the book is well written....and breaks things down to you in a very systematic approach. definitely recommend this book.

This is the sixth book I've read on my journey towards developing my own apps. It is definitely not for beginners, as it assumes much prior knowledge and does not "hold your hand" on the details of required coding steps. There is no fault in that, and was expected.

However, having gotten as far as Chapter 5, I am putting this book aside, perhaps never to refer to it again. The text and accompanying graphics are in conflict, and my results do not run. This is EXTREMELY FRUSTRATING. I am trying to learn a difficult (for me) subject, and do not appreciate blatant errors. Wiley Publishing does not provide any Errata on their website for this book, so I am not willing to continue tripping over their inaccurate knowledge.

If I hadn't marked up the book, I would be seeking a refund.

Shame on the author and publisher for rushing this book to market in an obvious attempt to cash in on the growing popularity of Apple's portable computing devices. I admit to seeking the same fortune, but I will hold myself to a higher standard than the dominating "Good Enough" mindset that pervades the manufacturing and publishing industries.

I have had some prior experience programming for the iPhone via various online help sources. I purchased this book in hopes of it being a good book to really dig into the SDK and write/learn alot more code. The book has several errors and outdated information right from the first few chapters. Their equivalent of a "Hello world" app doesn't even run from instruction; you have to assume several things.

Overall, I would not recommend. The book seems rushed and unchecked for readability and accuracy. I'm sure there are several better books written for iPhone development.

I recommend this book for anyone who already familiar with the MAC OS developer applications including the interface builder. But this is not for someone who is looking to start learning Cocoa Touch programming. The errata is not published online nor online resources referenced in the book. The author does a good job of explaining certain areas in depth but then breezes over other details for the user to figure out. I highly suspect that the editor did not fully review the material for readability or for content structure.

Also, since the release of Interface Builder 3.2.1 the author's instructions on how to build such things as outlets is wrong (this is a small but serious detail).

Overall I do not recommend this book for anyone but an advanced Cocoa Touch Programmer until the author works with the publisher to give buyers online support.

An excellent resource cover-to-cover, this book delivers in every chapter. Unlike a surprising number of other programming books, there's no fluff, no padding. The author gets right to the point and includes everything salient about the subject. Good stuff.

I've been developing iPhone applications for a year now, and I wish I had this book when I started. While not every topic is covered in depth, it goes over many aspects of the SDK to enough detail to get started writing my own applications. I have used a couple of the examples in the book to build or fix parts of my current applications that weren't working quite right. One of those is the chapter on Core Animation. I popped in the sample code, and had the animation doing the exact thing that was illustrated in the chapter.

While I have still found some use for this book, I think the best readers will be those who are new to iPhone development, and want to start off not from OS 1.0, but OS 3.0 The introduction to Core Data is great for a beginner. In fact, it's rather amazing that you can read about Core Data and how to use it within your Table Views effectively. Most books cover one or the other. XCode does, and will evolve, but the fundamentals laid down in this book will be of use to you for every new iPhone OS release.

I have not yet had a chance to complete reading the material in this book, so this is not really a full review. Overall the material of the book is what I expected, I just felt it necessary to warn others about purchasing this book as an e-book.The tables, screenshots, and diagrams are all scanned in such a low resolution for this book that it makes them virtually useless and inhibits the usefulness of the book. This is a rather annoying practice that publishers have gotten into recently to quickly digitize material and sell a poor quality product. I'm positive I would have been much happier with the print edition. I do not recommend anyone buy this book on the Kindle as you would not get anything useful out of it. Buy the print version.