This is a beginner's guide. If you want to get into the iPhone industry and have your games compete with the best, this book is for you. You should have some basic programming experience with Objective-C and a good understanding of OOP. A little experience of game programming in any language is welcome but not a must.
Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner's Guide
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About the Author
Pablo Ruiz
Pablo Ruiz started his carreer as a developer working as PHP developer for a local government office in 2007. Before that, he would work in QA for a big multinational game development company.
While working as a PHP developer he would build big administrative and accounting systems which were used across all the offices for their daily work.
In 2008 he began working on some small C# games using the XNA framework in his spare time. At the time, the iPhone was gaining ground so he began working on a personal project, a little game called Aqua Rush. After releasing it and starting doing consultancy work for several companies he left his day job and began working as a freelance iPhone developer.
Half a year later, he founded, with his partner, their own company; Infinix Mobile Software Development in Argentina, where he employs and trains students to learn and master the art of programming.
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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good spread, but way too hurried,
This review is from: Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner's Guide (Paperback)
I was contacted by the marketing team for this book to review. I posted its review on my website a few weeks ago [...]
Here is the repost: Till just a few weeks ago, there were no real books one could read on Cocos2D game programming. While there are an almost infinite number of web tutorials, a book has a different charm - it is usually more structured and hopefully better researched. A few weeks ago, the first book on Cocos2D surfaced, "Learn iPhone and iPad cocos2D game development" by Steffen Itterheim. I bought it on day 1 of its release, and posted my review here. In short, it was well written and, well, the very first book for cocos2D, so it had that first mover advantage. The other book I am eagerly waiting for is Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich's book "Learning Cocos2D". The book is yet to be released, but I get the feeling it will be more `advanced' than the other available books. In the mean time, I was contacted by another company, Packt Publishing who sent me an email to review a new book from them: Cocos 2D for iPhone 0.99 - Beginners Guide by Pablo Ruiz. Here is the introduction of the book, in the Preface: "This book will teach you the fundamentals of how to write games with this framework. As this book is meant to give you a basic knowledge of the most important aspects of Cocos2d, it will cover a lot of subjects very quickly. However, do not worry! Almost every chapter will include tasks for you to complete and examples for you to practice. Throughout this book, we'll make three different games and each chapter will build on the previous one, but can also be considered independently, so feel free to skip to any chapter that interests you." So this post is a review of this new book by Pablo. So how is Pablo Ruiz's "Cocos2D for iPhone 0.99' ? The Good -------- Its 350 pages of relevant content. The author dives into topics quickly and gets to code examples very soon. It covers the usual topics like fiddling with sprites, more details on actions, scene and menu management, particle systems, cocosdenshion I liked the fact that the examples Pablo chose of games are better than `stupid games that only prove a concept'. For example, "Chapter 2:Playing with Sprites" is a 54 (approx) page chapter which incrementally goes about building a board game where you align stones based on color by swapping them around and then when you align them, the stones destroy themselves. In this 50 page chapter, he goes through the basics of CCSprite, using CCTouchDispatcher for touch management, using Zwoptex to create Sprite Sheets,using CCTextureCache to pre load images for faster response time and even a few lines of OpenGL (basic stuff like drawing a box around an item you select) He continues the same board game across Chapters 3&4 (another 55 odd pages), where he embellished the game with actions (the usual CC actions along with the ease in action effects). There is a nice page in his book that shows the animation path of each ease action. It looks like it was copy pasted from some standards reference - if so, then you may already know about it - but to me, it was nice to see the easein/out effects on one page. Finally, in Chapter 4, he shows us how to add fonts and text labels to the game and goes through the basics on how to create your own font with CCBitmapFontAtlas. While the board game was interesting, I was getting bored. Fortunately, at Chapter 5, Pablo stars a new game that basically is called "Aerial Gun" which is a shooting game. You control an airplane while enemies approach you - you have to kill em. In this chapter his focus is on the basics of the game - sprite movement, handling accelerometer based movements, how to fire bullets (bullets stored in an array so you see a spurt of them), collision detection Then, in chapter 6, he adds options and other menus to the game, including telling us how to use the basis NSUserDefault class to store preferences Finally, in chapter 7,he integrates the Cocos2D particle system into his game to give explosion effects. One thing I liked was it covers the meaning of all the attributes of a particle system (again at a cursory level). Specifically, I liked the section where he covers how to give an explosion effect when your enemy is hit including telling us how to make the particles move correctly. All of this is directly by manipulating the particle parameters he briefly explained earlier. And then he finishes off with using ParticleDesigner, which is pretty much the defacto particle design tool, it seems In Chapter 8, he covers background panning using tilemaps. Nothing new or unique here. But if you don't know tilemaps, here it is. Chapter 9 covers the CC Sound engine. He covers both SimpleAudioEngine and CDSoundEngine What stands out from the others in this book is the chapter on Chipmunk. Chipmunk is a physics engine that can add realism to your games (like the toppling monuments in angry birds). Most tutorials and books cover Box2D (even Steffen's book I reviewed earlier). Box2D seems more able, but is reasonably more complicated. And I really wanted a good reference to chipmunk (as a beginner). I was very happy to see Pablo cover chipmunk. Just for that, I'd give him kudos. And also, he goes through several pages in building a relevant game - a totem block, that rests on top of various blocks of different shapes. Your goal is to remove the blocks without the totem falling on the floor. There is also a chapter on OpenFeint - I liked it. Frankly, I never knew about it. OpenFeint is a software library you can link your code with that allows your game to become "social". In other words, you get access to leader boards, get notifications on new scores from your buddies in your network, connect and post messages to Face Book and more. Yep, you guessed it. It can also become a nightmarish tool if you choose to abuse it (remember those beyond irritating messages from all your friends in facebook about some idiotic occurrence in some mafia game they were playing etc.) Used properly, OpenFeint looks like a very nice tool and Pablo covers it well. The Bad -------- The book is hurried. Just too hurried. When you start focusing on a topic into the next level of detail, you feel like the author is trying to complete a race in record time. While at first glance, it looks like he has spent time with details, when you really want to understand something new, you feel he should have spent more time with details. Code level commentary is high-level and has errors. Consider for example, the chapter on Chipmunk. This was my first point of interest, so I decided to actually try out his examples. I was not given his resource file zips, so I had to type them in myself. The instructions were cursory at best: Example, he just says "rename HelloWorld" to "GameScene" (no further instructions, and it is not just renaming - you have to rename more than one part, and refactoring was a better approach as far as I feel) He says "in init method of GameLayer class, change space gravity to 0,-200' without saying where that line would be and what are we looking for. Again, basic stuff - if you know your stuff, you don't have an issue. But if you are a beginner, you are left wondering Finally, he asks us to introduce a line declaring a totem variable, which never compiles because the instructions forgot to tell us to declare it first (and there too, he says in another example "declare an ivar" - thats all). Again, not an issue for those who know, but if you are really a beginner, you will feel lost at his pace and choice to ignore details. So basically, you either describe it well enough and the reader can figure out errors on their own, or, you describe it at a high level but make sure the code has no errors. Again, like I said - I did not get enough time to actually try his other examples. Unfortunately, the first chapter I did try to get into details (chipmunk) left me floundering (remember I am a beginner to cocos2d, and am supposed to be a target audience for his book as per the preface) There may be other issues, I am on travel, so I could not do a thorough read. Verdict - Better than Steffen Itterheims Cocos2d book? ----------------------------------------------- Frankly, from what I read so far, I don't think so. While Pablo's book covers more topics, the one chapter I actually decided to dive into came out with several errors. Steffen's book is more thought out and not hurried at all. And I'd say there i around 60-70% intersection of topics between the books. And unless I try out more of Pablo's code in the book, I can't honestly say it is the book for beginners. But besides that, it covers enough topics to be of interest. I think if Pablo spent more time with details on the book, it would be a treasure trove. Also, there is limited (or no) handling of the more advanced Cocos2D functions like isometric tilemaps, Cocos2D Camera, Parallax scrolling etc. Having said all of the above, I think the author will likely improve the quality of the book in future versions. Should you buy it? --------------- Well, if it was the first book, I would buy it. Since I already have one book and I will surely buy the one by Rod & Ray (just because of the reputation), it makes buying this book a not-so-easy-choice. For those who choose to buy it, it will give you lots of help and a great head start. But be expected to be rushed and brace yourselves for errors in code.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rushed and Poorly Edited,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner's Guide (Paperback)
I wanted to like this book, I really did. But, sadly, I cannot recommend it. Just to set the target point, my Gold Standard for iPhone texts are the Apress books : "Beginning iPhone 3 Development" and "More iPhone 3 Development". Those are 5-Star books. On to this one, and why it is a one or, at best, a two star book.
* Missing Code Resources. Right from the get-go, there is a major problem. The chapter 2 code resources for the first section of chapter 2 are 100% incorrect. Sure the stuff in the book looks good, and the stuff you download will compile and run; BUT, the code you download does not match the code in the book! In fact you cannot even build the code in the book as some resources are missing in the download! And, this is NOT an isolated incident. * English as a second language. Ok, this is a tech book. But, there are editors at Packt that get paid money to proof-read the basic text of a book. There can be NO excuse for broken English to get into print in the amount seen here. It is not a book-breaker on its own, but it is a constant irritation. * OOP?? Whazzat? The architecture presented for the systems is, to put it bluntly, awful. It is like the author had never heard of OOP or MVC. You might learn a bit here and there about Cocos2d, but even the simple examples in this book cry out for a real software engineering solution. * Just a little Cocos2d. In the process of making the example games, more time and effort is spent on creating the (bad) game architecture than is spent with Cocos2d. In fact, very little space is used to explain and illustrate the exact HOW and WHY the Cocos2d API works. Yes, Cocos2d is used. Yes, Cocos2d API calls are listed out. But to what end? Nothing about Cocos2d is really explained very well. * Logic Bugs crawling around. Yes, the code will build and run. But there are logic and operational bugs in the code. A lot of them. By trying to do to much, the examples end up being very incomplete, and in many ways broken. There are also a number of "I will show you how to fix this later." type statements; and the 'later' never comes. * Just does not feel finished. In working through the book, the feel I get is one of impatience and rushed work by the author. The example projects do not proceed in a clean, cohesive fashion. To many interesting capabilities are left for the reader to do as an 'exercise'. Chapters cover to much disparate ground, and in a very shallow a manner. The book would have been better served with double the number of chapters, each covering ONE concept of the Cocos2d, in depth. The book is supposed to be about Cocos2d specifically; not making games. I am giving this book a 2-star rating as it does have some merit; one can learn from it. If you cannot afford, or want, to buy the Cocos2d game source code to learn from, then there is little alternative. I would hope that the publisher would require the author to fix the source download so that it matches the book and that the resources needed are present. Just be aware of the limitations of this text, and the amount of extra work you will need to do to get through it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good structure ... but already outdated,
This review is from: Cocos2d for iPhone 0.99 Beginner's Guide (Paperback)
(Taken from full review at 'Under The Bridge' blog -- [...])
TL;DR If you've completed a cocos2d game ... no, this is not a reference; you'll probably find some tidbits of value, but I wouldn't make it a high priority purchase. You probably guessed that from the `Beginner's Guide' name. However, if you are a complete beginner to game programming ... no, the name notwithstanding, what this does cover will be over your head, and it doesn't cover things not related to cocos2d directly a beginner needs introduction to. We heartily recommend the iPhone Game Kit for you. If you're a programmer new to the iPhone platform ... you'll struggle with the Objective-C, no doubt. Come back after you've done a program or two, got the Cocoa memory model down, and so forth. So if none of those apply, presumably you know something about programming iOS already at the UIKit level and now you want to get into programming games, and you need a walkthrough of cocos2d design principles and the associated development toolchain? Excellent, you're the person this is actually appropriate for -- as long as you're fully aware that much of the book has already been overtaken by recent developments. EXCURSUSES First off, take a look at the chapter list in this cocos2d forum announcement. Topic selection is good, progression is straightforward. No complaints about the overall structure then, this is indeed a well designed introduction to cocos2d. However ... One big problem with doing a book like this is that you will inevitably be overtaken by events. Let us take this exchange from the cocos2d forums: cell-gfx: Reading through the timer example in the book on page 28, you use the schedule:@selector method of scheduling an update to your node. However, when I refer to the cocos wiki, it says to use scheduleUpdate... pabloruiz55: Yes it would, but as the chapter was written a while back the scheduleUpdate method didn't exist scheduleUpdate was added in 0.99.3. The version of cocos2d distributed with the sample code as of right now is 0.99.1. The current version of cocos2d is 0.99.5. The changes are substantial enough that people are encountering some difficulty applying the book's code with the current release. So it's pretty difficult to recommend something wholeheartedly when you know people are going to struggle with it through no fault of their own; at the very least, if you publish a book like this you should at least keep the samples up to date with the current release, and a list of updates/errata such as the above, I'm thinking; in a designated blog for book discussions, if nothing else. Same problem applies to the chapters about tools. It goes over the Zwoptex web version for sprite sheets, not the native version or Texture Packer. The fonts chapter, we were wincing at the Hiero and Angelcode discussion: "Both are very good tools" -- no. No, they are not. Granted that Glyph Designer is brand spanking new right now and no doubt was completely unheard of as the book was written, but someone picking up cocos2d today really needs to be informed about that. Again, this is the kind of thing that would be most properly addressed by something like a designated blog, or perhaps errata updates mailed to registered users. Another example of this problem is that even the design walkthrough, which is generally good, can be significantly in error. We were brought up short on page 47 of the PDF for instance, with "When you quit your game ... the applicationWillTerminate method will be called. This is a good time to save your game's state..." Ah ... no. Not on iOS 4. (Unless you go to some effort to get that behaviour). That would be a perfectly acceptable oversight in a book released in July last year. In December? Not so much. If lead times are so long that a statement that's been wrong for six months can't get corrected for publication, then there really needs to be some mechanism for distributing errata. Moving on, we were mildly disturbed by the code samples in general. Picking on the Chapter 4 `ColouredStones' example in particular, we load it up to find it's looking for SDK 3.0. Sort that, we get "Code Sign error: The identity `iPhone Developer: Pablo Ruiz (4LFH26A558)' doesn't match any valid certificate/private key pair in the default keychain" and it's set at project and target level both. OK, we can sort this out in 15 seconds, but a beginner cannot. Messr. Ruiz overlooking this before uploading, hey we can let that slide. Technical reviewers? Not so much, guys. Especially when we get around to Build and Analyze: [ screenshot here showing "Incorrect decrement of the reference count..." analyzer error ] Okay, if you're working for me, and you check in code with any warnings or analyzer results, we will have words. If you check in code with an analyzer error "Incorrect decrement of the reference count of an object that is not owned at this point by the caller", we will have harsh words. That code which would only compile on the author's machine and that contains significant errors made it through to the downloads? The reviewers have not done their job acceptably. Yeah, our standards are high. So should yours be. That said, with a little coaxing we did get all three of the game samples to run, and they are well chosen to give a good overview of the functionality discussed throughout the book; so we're only mildly disturbed, there is a good bit of value here. We could nitpick a while more, but you've pretty much got our feeling now; the book is well designed for what it is, which would be more accurately named "Walkthrough of cocos2d Development for the iOS Programmer" than a "Beginner's Guide", that being somewhat of a misnomer. However, it's well designed for the state of cocos2d development prior to iOS 4, which makes reading it now mildly problematic. And that goes even more so for the source code, which is not only somewhat outdated but really should have had much better review before letting it loose on the readers. Valuable, yes; exemplary, not by a long shot. So clean the code, update it to current recommended practices, update the tools chapters, and put a process in place for updates to stay in sync with continuing cocos2d development; yep, we'd give 2nd Edition a solid five stars as an excellent introduction to cocos2d. What we're reviewing today ... yes, we'd recommend it to someone who asked for the best way to start getting up to speed on cocos2d we knew of, but would make a point of telling them to read the caveats above. Three stars, that's about the best we can muster up. Still, a fine effort by Messr. Ruiz, and we do hope sales go well enough to merit an update!
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