Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 Hours

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I've read through the first nine or so chapters and tried a couple of examples - fairly impressed so far.

Good:
+ loads of color screenshots.
+ strong on UI description and diagrams.
+ easy read and good flow, without compromising content or making silly jokes all the time.
+ technically most of it is correct, with a few caveats.
+ quite strong on application lifecycle and the authors have an ability to put some points over (sometimes fairly complex points) in a surprisingly efficient and straightforward way.

Not as good:
- some typos/errors (missing pointer asterisks, diagrams that don't display what is discussed in the text).
- some fundamental errors related to properties (@property/@synthesize are not in any way required in order to make use of dot syntax), also the book declares properties and then doesn't use them, but makes the mistake of thinking they're needed in order to access properties of a pre-existing class. Interestingly - and I suspect not entirely unrelated - Mark and LaMarche made the exact same error in the first edition of their Apress iPhone dev book.
- ok Objective-C coverage but by no means great (though the authors stress the need to read up on it elsewhere).

The good points outweigh the bad and I'd recommend the book with the provisos: get an Obj-C book to go with it, and you'll probably want to read it with another iPhone dev book to get a different viewpoint (eg. Apress or Pragmatic Programmers).

If you're a developer who has never worked on Apple platforms before, this book is GREAT. The iPhone training materials from Apple are thorough but they are frustrating to anyone coming into it cold and wanting to know how to start. This book plugs all of the holes and gets you going fast. It does not give you every little detail but the point is that you can build simple but interesting aps, understanding what you are doing at each step of the way, and come out of it knowing how to continue by yourself. I looked at a lot of other books and they were either too simplistic, only oriented at games, too advanced, etc.

Couple of challenges... the index is mediocre and there was one missing step in the early stages (you have to go into xCode->Windows->Organizer and actually enable your iPhone for development or it won't load your debug aps).

While other iPhone books received many deserved praises, I found that this book had the easiest explanation and learning curve for the beginner cocoa touch and objective-c programmer.

After read all the book, you will be prepared to absorb more demanding books easily. It's a great intro book and really worth your money, specially the first chapters.

It is not "24 Hours". Each lesson takes you through a development step by step explaining everything apparently very clearly. But then about half of the exercises won't compile, or having compiled, crash on the simulator. Never trusted anything enough to load it on my actual phone. Instead of wrangling with this book that has good intentions but poor execution, I suggest going to Stanford University on iTunes University and taking their CS193p course. Good videos and rough assignments. But it may get me through. All this book did was start me on the path, but then throw roadblocks in the way.

I have been able to get all of the examples through the first 14 chapters to work. I have at least a dozen iPhone books and think comparatively this is the best or second best starter book (O'Reilly's Head First is good too). Most chapters do take more than an hour(Of course I'm learning Objective-C at the same time). I also like the fact that this is the first book to show you how to get examples on to your own iPod Touch from the beginning of the book instead of telling you to just use the X-Code simulator. but (and this is a big but) DOWNLOAD THE ERRATA from the Sams website first. It will save you a lot of frustration.

I've been banging away it this book on and off for a few days now. I very much liked the last Sams 24 hour book I read on Android programming, and my expectations were high for this one. However, I find myself feeling somewhat let down after having plugged through the first 11 chapters.

The main problem is that the chapters are too long! The beauty of Sam's books is that they have really short chapters that you get through in a few pages and are done. However, this one has the idea of presenting you with a completely new application with each chapter. While the applications are nice, this makes it somewhat difficult to keep the chapters short by incrementally building on the previous chapter's code.

What this means is that you have to type in a lot of code before you finally get to see the results. And if you are careless or mess something up, then you're into debugging in a language and IDE you don't know. This leads, at least my case, to grueling debugging sessions where you waste a lot of time tracking down what usually turns out to be a typo or some other silly mistake on your own part. Even with the sample code to compare against, you can easily miss something in those incredibly long object and method names that are apparently part of Cocoa and/or Objective C.

Anther drawback to the separate application per chapter approach is that your don't get to see the code in depth as you would if you were constantly going over the same code and building on it incrementally. In one chapter, they actually added a second, smaller project onto the original one to demonstrate scrolling! Important, but why not make it a separate, tiny chapter?

Another issues is that that they sometimes preface the instructions with a somewhat detailed explanation of what they are trying to do. This forces you to attempt to conceptualize what's going to happen while wading through text. It's easier on the reader to just skip that filler and go straight to the project building steps. They would do better to explain it in-line only and with shorter sentences.

Another suggestion (followed in the Android version) would to put the chapter on debugging *at the front* of the book. Why wait until you've gone through all the examples and *then* show how to debug? After today's 6 hour debugging session on chapter 11, I realized I should just go ahead and read chapter 23 and learn how to debug this stuff properly.

Also, I know it's hard to "be more funny", but I'm finding the book to lack much in the way of humor, being on the wordy side and/or not quite light enough. it's a tough line to walk with an intrinsically dull topic - computer coding - but it has been done.

Finally, while the book is straightforward in explaining what to do, there is a kind of lack of conceptual insight provided - it's definitely a follow the dots kind of book. That's ok and clearly preferable to a theoretical book. Still, a few visual diagrams about how things works, e.g. connectors and outlets and the interface builder and how they relate to the code might have been helpful. Also, maybe a list of how the interfaces builder properties can be checked against the program code would be nice.

I'm debating whether to give up on this book and go to another recommended one like Big Nerd or Dummies or HeadFirst. But, since I bought this one, I guess I'll stick with it for now.

On the plus side, the authors are highly knowledgable and give great tips on current best practices in iPhone UI creation. The illustrations are in color, which I like because it makes the visuals more enjoyable. The code which you can download all works and makes for a much-needed comparison against your own code. (I've only spotted a couple of errors in the printed version).

Some tips:

If you don't see your program variable names coming up when you try to attach to them in the interface builder, make sure you've selected the correct controls in the interfaces. For example, a label is not input and a textbox isn't output by default.

Also, make sure you save your header file before going into the interface builder, or you won't see the variables and methods you want to latch up your UI components and component events to.

As others have mentioned, to run the sample code, you will have edit the project setting and select your current sdk. Plus, if you're running in the simulator, make sure to specify that in the ide because the default setting on the sample code is to run on the device.

Please, don't be like me and rush through the code entry. Be careful and precises or else you will lose hours of work tracking down your carelessly introduced bugs.

Also, run your code earl and often. Try to catch those errors early. It seems like most chapters I'd get to the end, and the interface would be all fouled up. So, I'd have to do it over, this time carefully running the simulator at each step to make sure the UI was shaping up properly.

This book is well-organized, with 24 lessons and online resources to help you learn how to program with XCode. At first I thought it was not updated enough to work with the new iPhone 4 Software Development Kit, but realized once Apple released the 4.0.1 version that the problem was mainly with their software. The only problems I've had with the lessons so far (up to Hour 6) is that some of the files you download from the books website, like the icon.png files may need to be opened and saved into more updated version before you can proceed with the lessons. For some of the XCode files you download, you may get a message that the "Base SDK" is not loaded, since it is looking for an older version. If you go to Project | Edit Project Setting, then you can change the Base SDK to the new iPhone Device 4.0.

As others have commented, the first twelve-to-fourteen chapters are excellent. They did an good job teaching the basics with very understandable examples. However, right around the fourteenth chapter everything falls apart. They start feeding you code without a lot of detailed explanation. Many of the example projects are just flat out broken because of the typos and lack of direction. I am amazed that they didn't take time to quality check their book before publishing it. Very, very sloppy.

With that said, if you do pick up this book make sure you also download the example code from their website because it will be VITAL in order to compare their broken mess that they had you type in to something that actually works. You might want to skip typing in their code altogether and just follow along with the downloaded examples. You also just might want to skip this book entirely and find something written with a little more care.

For sometime I have been interested in developing an iPhone app of my own, but thought the task far more technical than I would be able to comprehend.
"Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 hours" was published (2nd printing in February 2010) before the new iPhone4 OS was released. This may account for some of the issues I experienced, but was still able to overcome.
This book's focus is towards those with no or very little experience coding (me).
Divided into 24 chapters or 24-1 hour lessons, this paperback tips the scales at 600+ pages. Acknowledging the gravity of this book, I knew it would take far more then the 24 hours for me generate an application. Reaffirmed in the introduction by the authors, citing additional time is required to work through tutorials and review documentation on the apple website. The subject of these additional lessons include introductions to some pretty complex programming languages such as Objective-C and Cocoa. Apple does try and make the learning curve as flat as possible, however a lot of reading and re-reading is involved.
I'm a pretty realistic guy, if this book would have be titled "...Development in 24 months", I would have never considered it. Given the complexity of the subject, to me this is still acceptable. The book is organized in a logical easy to follow manner with clear color illustrations of screen shots that I found very helpful.
At the time this review was written I have managed to download the Xcode software and other tools that are essential to programing in iPhone OS 3.x, and register my iPhone to simulate applications that I develop for testing. I am presently wading through crash course tutorials on Objective C coding language.
Overall I think that this book is exceptional in teaching those who are serious about and new to iPhone application development and an excellent resource, even with the advancement of a new iPhone OS.

Halfway through the book, I found myself getting pretty confused. I thought, I need an Objective-C book to find out what's behind all this, since this book isn't going to give you that sort of foundation. I bought one, and it's pretty good, but not as good as having everything you need all in one place. I would suggest getting the Big Nerd Ranch iPhone Programming book; it's much more thorough than this one.