Customer Reviews

Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development in 24 Hours (2nd Edition) (Sams Teach Yourself -- Hours)

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book inspired me to write my first-ever review on Amazon (after being a customer since virtually day one). The reason I was so "inspired" is that this book has some real problems. If you are not a reasonably accomplished programmer in other languages/platforms, stay clear. Typos, omissions and flat-out wrong code abound. I downloaded the errata and that doesn't even cover it all. My book is full of notes. Chapter 16 seems to be particularly bad. For example, they have you enter:

newCard.question = thisQuestion;

When the correct code is:

[newCard setValue:thisQuestion forKey:@"question"];

The other problem I have with it is that the authors (particularly whoever wrote the first 14 to 15 chapters make horrible variable and object naming choices. Sometimes the only difference between the type and the instance is a difference in capitalization:

int Int;

Not an actual example (don't care to go through the book to find a real one) but they are all over the place.

An extension of this is when they use similar names for different things and get them confused. For example: "wrongCount" and "wrongCounter".

They also call out for editing the wrong files at times and even confuse prior chapters' projects with current projects. Probably a cut-and-paste thing while writing.

There's a real difference in style between the two authors. Starting around chapter 14/15 the tone and approach changes. The second author tells you to "right click" all the time...when Macs don't have but one mouse button. Lucky for me the first thing I do to a Mac is throw away the useless mouse and replace it with a Logitech trackball...so, in my case, right-clicking works just fine.

I am just getting past chapter 16 and I will finish the book but it made me so angry for wasting so much of my time that I had to post a review.

Should you buy it? I don't know. If you are an accomplished programmer you might look at the above problems as an opportunity to learn more because of having to debug the code and figure out where they screwed-up. That's how I am taking it. I don't like it because I wanted to push through this book quickly and move on to more advanced books, but you play the cards you are dealt. Happy debugging!

This is the 4th book that I have read on the subject, and it is by far the most useful, most understandable, and most complete. The author covers everything using clear explanations and examples, and the tutorials and sample programs teach you the principles you need to further your iPhone programming skills. This book finally makes iPhone Programming (and Objective-C) understandable and fun. I wish I would have found this book sooner.

I loved this book at the very beginning, as it explained everything very nicely and easily. But when i kept on reading it, i found that there are lot of mistakes and didn't explain the hard stuffs like it used to in the beginning.

I've recently decided to dive into the iPhone development arena, and as such, have picked up various books to assist me in the pursuit of that endeavor.

There are two books in particular that I'd highly recommend to an aspiring iPhone developer:

This book here, to introduce you to the Xcode IDE as a whole. It'll ensure that you have what you need to get up and running with iPhone development with just enough of an Objective-C explanation to put together a few choice apps.

And "Programming in Objective-C 2.0" by Stephen Kochan. It gives an excellent set of lessons on the Objective-C language, ultimately having you build a traditional calculator app.

Back to Sam's book:

Pros
- Full-color, the book presents beautiful screenshots that represent the Xcode environment true to life.
- UP TO DATE! It teaches you how to use Xcode with the newly released iOS 4 operating system. This is a serious advantage, as I've already returned two books for having outdated material.
- Simplifies ideas to a point where you can easily understand them. For example, other books that I read would go and have you implement an NSMutableArray without telling you what one of those was. This book went the extra mile and notated that Mutable simply means it can be modified after its created.
- Each hour ends with a Q&A, as well as a workshop for you to further build upon ideas and concepts learned that hour.

Cons
- Unless you buy the book here at Amazon, the price is ridonkulous. On par with other texts of the type, of course, but still ridonkulous.
- Not sure if all the projects are affected by the issue, but I know that in Hour 2, you're unable to run the HelloSimulator project due to the iOS 4.2 SDK not being released to the public at this time. So unless you're gonna pony up the $99.00 to join Apple's paid developer service, you're outta luck for the time being.
- Various grammar and spelling issues, but really? They're few and far between, and don't detract from the overall quality of the book.

In the end, I can't stress enough how helpful this book has been. I'm proud to have it on my bookshelf, and would definitely recommend it to others.

HIGHLY recommended.

Sams has come a long way with the pulp style books produced in the 90's. This book impressed me a lot with the low acid high quality paper. The glossy full color graphics and diagrams that is not just for show. Heck, even the code snippets in the book are syntax highlighted in color! Now we must remember that the title of these books is a misnomer. They have no intention of teaching you iPhone development in a 24 hour day. What they have is basically 24 chapters, that which they believe take roughly an hour long to read with reasonable retention. The goal of course is to compete in the competitive market full of "Dummies, 21 days, Made Easy books, or other advertising gimmicks". This book has a fair advantage in taking the textbook organizational approach. It becomes more of a learning tool and less of a reference book that way. Now reference books are just fine, but you don't want to read a dictionary or a look-up guide. You want to start at an understandable level, and then progress to accomplish a competent bit of learning.

This book appears to have the progressive learning part well done. It starts out by helping you get set up as a developer for Apple, and gets you oriented with the basics such as the iPhone simulator and how to create projects. Of course here is what it doesn't do! While it says in the beginning no previous experience with "Objective C, Cocoa, or the Apple Developer tools is required", I find that statement stretches the truth quite a little bit. The book here is really talking to programmers! While I've got no real idea what they teach the average High Schooler today, from watching the programmers come and go at my place of business, I can say a lot of people won't get this without training.

Case in point: some years back I took some post graduate courses at a local technical school. One course was in JAVA, I'd had college level courses in FORTRAN, C, C++, and was self-taught in BASIC, so the programming course was easy for me. Early on I spent time correcting the instructor, who had a limited understanding of some of the object-oriented concepts herself. That brought me to the attention of some of the students who were having a hard time. They had filled the pre-requisite which was a course in standard DOS based BASIC (not even Visual BASIC), so they could not understand that despite having lofty GPA's they were failing in JAVA! After fielding their questions I understood why. First, in BASIC they had learned a type of syntax to put code in to create structure, JAVA uses mostly a "C" language like syntax so it's very different. Next, the book quickly delves into using JAVA class libraries which are not part of the basic language keywords to build data structures, so using them is more of a memory thing. Finally, Object Oriented languages is a new idea to many classic or beginning programmers, and JAVA does not allow you to avoid using it, so there is a paradigm shift that must take place. It's like trying to take three programming courses in one! Bottom line here folks: if you know nothing of programming, this book is not a 101 guide for it, nor was it ever intended to be!

As for the books content, it has pretty good coverage of many things you'll want to use programming the iPhone. It does not have "full coverage", the API is extensive, and you'll have to use look-up resources, or more advanced books to get to everything, but this is still an excellent start.

Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Application Development, while not a one shop stop for all your app development needs, is a really good book for those with some programming experience. The book is structured to present one aspect of iPhone App development per chapter. The author claims that each chapter can be read in an hour and, overall, I found this to be the case. This arrangement of aspects of App development and design into bit sized chucks is hardly the only thing that the author of this book does right. Each chapter contains full color photographs of syntax highlighted code and Xcode screen-shots. I found this to be incredibly helpful in that it made transferring knowledge represented in the book to what I was seeing on the computer very easy. The author presents information not just on how to use a particular widget or other feature of the IOS but he also when to use it, per presentation of Apple's User Interface guidelines for that particular feature of the IOS. I should note that I came to this book with some experience in Objective-C, and, as far as I can see, without that experience I would not have been able to follow this book. The author claims you should be able to use this book even if you have had no prior programming experience but I think you will be hard pressed to keep up with this text without some general programming experience. Finally, due to the imminent release of IOS 5 and Xcode 4.2 both of which are being significantly upgraded, this book will soon be outdated. For example, IOS 5 introduces memory management for Objective-C thus relagating much of chapter (hour) 3 irrelevant. Also, Xcode itself is due for some changes, some of which, like integration of Interface Builder into Xcode itself, have already been offered in version 4.1 of Xcode. I noticed that the author is coming out with a new book called "Sams Teach Yourself iOS Application Development in 24 Hours" in December. Due to the above mentioned changes, I recommend waiting for that edition to come out. In short, I like the approach of this book and, if this approach is carried over to the new edition (as I am sure it will be) I can heartily recommend either this edition or the next edition of this book.

I have some sympathy for the author(s), because in a book like this you have to address not only the programming language (Objective C), but also the Cocoa API and building interfaces. There is a lot of ground to cover. Still, I found myself frequently confused because the actual programming concepts underlying application logic were not adequately explained. Hour 14 on the flashcard application is particularly frustrating, where certain code listings go largely unexplained. As others have mentioned, typos and inconsistencies are also a major source of frustration. Overall, I learned a lot reading this but it took me far more than "24 hours" to get through because of all the problems I had to figure out on my own.

First, I am not a programmer and have only read basic how-tos on iPhone app development. From that perspective I would not be able to create a full app after the "24 hours" this book says it would take. However, I think this book is a fantastic resource, that when used with other resources, would help me develop an iPhone application. Would it be fantastic? I don't know.

From what I can see it covers the basics to the more advanced. As I said, I am not a developer, so I would not know if anything was wrong or missing.

It isn't the easiest book to read, but I would not expect a book of this nature to be easy to read.

As I said in the title this seems like it would be a textbook for a course. It has questions/quizzes at the end of each chapter to review what was covered.

If I am ever able to complete a successful iPhone app I am sure that this book will have been there as one of my resources that taught me how to do it.

This book is a great guide and very easy to follow. Anyone can learn to create an iPhone app relatively quickly with this book. The book's description explains what you will learn better than I ever could:

Printed in full color--figures and code appear as they do in Xcode
Covers iOS 4.0 and up
Learn the features of Xcode 3.2 and Interface Builder
Prepare your system and iPhone for efficient development
Get started quickly with Apple's Objective-C and Cocoa Touch
Understand the Model-View-Controller (MVC) development paradigm
Design highly usable applications with interactive widgets and web-connected interfaces
Use Table views to navigate structured data
Build rotatable and resizable user interfaces
Read and write data and create System Setting plug-ins
Use the iPhone's media playback and recording capabilities
Create map and location-based (GPS) services
Sense motion and orientation with the iPhone's accelerometer and the iPhone 4 gyroscope
Create universal applications that run on the iPhone and iPad
Write background-aware multitasking applications
Distribute your applications through the App Store

I have to admit that I didn't work my way all the way through this book. There are a couple reasons, besides the fact that I'm not a professional programmer but a hobbyist/academic with some interest in developing my own apps for research / data collection purposes. First, it became clear to me that the real challenge in iPhone app. development for the App Store is less the technical programming side, which this book teaches effectively enough, but the conceptual side - coming up with an app which can stand out among the tens of thousands out there. Second, along with that, every idea I had would also require a server and a bunch of datasets (e.g. on local businesses across the US) which would mean another large project alongside the app. And third and most importantly, the kind of stuff that's covered in most of this book - iPhone UI elements - can be developed using tools like Corona, Titanium or PhoneGap (which also has the advantage of being very easily portable to other devices).

Which brings me to one of the problems with the book - after the preliminaries, up to chapter 13 the book is pretty singlemindedly focused on UI elements. After a while I felt tired of just doing some other slight variation on a notification or picker, variations on familiar web development tasks that don't really take advantage of or show off the features of the device. I'd recommend jumping around a bit if you want this to hold your interest. I'd have liked to at least have had ch. 14 on reading and writing application data and maybe ch. 16 on handling multitouch gestures earlier on.

That said, the authors do a good job of reinforcing concepts, and just the sheer volume of exercises will get you familiar with XCode and the quirky syntax and conventions of Objective-C. (Obj-C experience isn't necessary but some programming experience is, or some other concurrent training). These are skills that transfer readily to Mac and iPad development as well.

Readers should be aware that there is a new version of XCode out since this book was published.