Customer Reviews

iOS 4 Programming Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Apps

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly Author and developer of the Great iPhone Development Video series. That being said, I'm not one for pulling punches when I see issues with with people's code (ask anyone I've ever code reviewed :).

This is the book I wish I'd had when I started developing for the iPhone. I started writing apps about two weeks after the infamous Apple Developer NDA was lifted and information started trickling out onto the Internet. If I'd have had a book like the iOS Cookbook I could have saved myself many hours of painful trial and error while learning Objective C and what is now the iOS API.

This is not really a book for a beginning iOS programmer. It's a book for someone who's done a couple of simple apps and has the basic idiom down. If you're looking to learn Objective-C or the mechanics of writing an iPhone app, this book will not help you. But if you can already write a functional app, the code snippets in this book will trim lots of time off of your learning curve when it comes to implementing more sophisticated features like Core Data, gestures, etc.

There are a few areas where the examples could be clearer, and it's clearly impossible to cover some of the more sophisticated functions of areas like Core Data in 620 pages. But overall this is an excellent REFERENCE for new and experienced app developers alike, and I'd recommend adding it to your library.

Disclaimer: The author is a coworker of mine at Monitise Group.

First things first: it's a good book. It's covers a lot of area, and it has a *lot* of usable sample code; there's an excellent chance that you can see things and immediately apply them to your own projects. It also covers the stuff which is a pain to find good information about online, such as the C frameworks (EventKit, AddressBook, etc). I know from experience that Apple's sample code for this tends to be unhelpful, and I spotted at least two flat out wrong things in Apple's AddressBook documentation last year, so having a good book for the C frameworks is nice. It also covers much of the iOS 4.0 stuff, such as multitasking. (Older books tend to either not cover it because iOS 4.0 only came out in June 2010, or they rushed it because they desperately needed to have something on the page about it. This book gives it a decent treatment.)

What's not so good is that the book tries to walk a tightrope between being a beginner book and an advanced book, and ends up in the middle somewhere. There's a lot of overview material, such as refreshers on the basics of retain/release memory management, that advanced iOS programmers will already know, but which have large gaps that less experienced programmers will fall into without even realizing it. For example (and only people who know some Objective-C will understand what I mean here), that overview of retain/release memory management gives a *paragraph* to autorelease, which mostly suggests using manual release instead. I can understand that argument and its advantages, even if I don't agree with it. However, the great majority of objects you deal with in an Objective-C app - including almost every NSString you make - were already autoreleased by Apple's code! If you don't know at least the basics of autorelease, I don't think you can write a program without mysterious crashes all over the place...and this book expects you to already know about it. If this is an advanced book, why was any space spent on the basics? If it's a near-beginners book, why do the overviews not teach you *everything* you need to know?

Bear in mind that this is a good book, even though I spent more time talking about the negatives than the positives; it's just that it cannot be your only Objective-C book. You *need* some experience in writing apps for iOS or the Mac before you can use it. I wish they'd taken out the basics, but them in some other book, and crammed in some more advanced-level material...but then, these days, if a book covered every 'advanced' thing in iOS in enough detail to make me happy, I'd have to take it off the shelf with a forklift.

I started reading the first chapter as soon as my book arrived; this chapter is about objects and memory allocation which I kind of am new to. So I did a bit of online searching to get some more details about things. Prety sure they didn't write everything in this book simply because they mentioned it is not for beginners and also because this book is already *hugetastic*.I can imagine how expensive this book would have been had they described every little thing in it. Anyway, I have now learned about object allocaion and deallocation and the whole object life-cycle but I still find myself struggling sometimes, so, my suggestion would be to include more subjects in this chapter to help newbies like me! Some of the titles that I really enjoyed which are covered in this book are things such as: taking a screenshot of the iOS device, drawing simple shapes, writing multitasking aware apps, using the gyroscope (this is really really new to me)

One of the things that I want to ask O'Reilly for the next release of this book is to include more photos as I have already mentioned. The more photos the merrier! To sum it up, this is an extremely useful book even if you are a novice like me but you just have to be smart enough to find some supplementary subjects online if you find out that the thing you are looking for isn't covered in this book (which again isn't necessarily for newbies but is darned helpful regardless!).

My suggestions for the book are ==> 1) add more example codes for typical object allocation and etc, just so that readers can learn objective-c without having to refer to any other reference.I know this is not an objective-c book but would be good if basics were all explained here.2) I want more examples for graphics, maybe some 3d graphics as well to make games, some physics and so on and so forth to help beginner game developers. Anyway, whatever the case, this book is proving to be a great asset for me and I look forward to referencing it over and over and over again :)

This is a quite handy book for iOS developers. It is not for beginners though; a basic understanding of Obj-C and iOS programming is needed.

The good thing about this book is that it gives you a complete solution to a specific problem you might come up. I normally do a Google search for a code snippet, but most of the results are not verified or confirmed. Sometimes I just end up spending lots of time wondering around for a simple function. This book provided samples and discussions in different categories, which makes it easy to navigate and locate the problem you want to solve.
The explanation of each receipt is very clear as well.

When I wanted to use Core Data in one of my apps, I just did a search in Apple's documents, and got a really long list. There is a tutorial, but not much on actually add it into my app. I then turned to this book for help; there is a complete section about Core Data, including every operation I need to implement, separated into receipt. So I can just follow the receipt to add Core Data support. That's the thing I need!

Some of the receipts there are from iOS3.x though, not updated to iOS4. Taking movie playing for example, Apple has provided a new simpler controller to play full screen movie since iOS3.2. But the receipt in this book failed to mention it.

Generally speaking, it is very useful and practical. I would suggest every iOS developer to put this book on the desk as a reference.

some very handy examples there i wish there were some more applied examples such as how and when I should mix two or more gesture recognizers. i have some problem with that but i think i will find my answer eventually either in this book or somewhere else. the networking chapter was nice. The material I struggled with from this chapter was the whole caching stuff the author talked about. i think the example about caching files on disk is a bit difficult to understand... actually not a bit but really difficult to understand!!! but I will have to read it again to fully get it. This is one of the few places in the book where I still am struggling to learn the example code. the rest of the example codes in this chapter are pretty easy to learn. it might be that this particular example will be difficult no matter how you implement it because the author goes into explaining how you can download a file from a URL store it on the disk keep its time stamp and if you make another request to download the file check the timestamp and return the file from cache if for example the expiry of that file has not come to pass. pretty difficult concept hence the difficulty of that example. What I would like to see in the next edition of this book would be some other new subjects such as AirPrint.

I've read other iOS books, some from Erica Sadun and some from other authors. This book easily dwarves Eric's iOS cookbook for the fact that this book 1) has a lot of up to date examples about iOS 4 2) this book's examples have that wow factor to them and what I mean by that is when you see some of the code in this book, you'll go "Oh of course, why didn't I think of that?" so it's pretty amazing.


The book is quite beefy, it's thick and covers tons of subjects in iOS. Multitasking is my weakness. I know that iOS 4 has been out for a long time but I still struggle with Multitasking but having skimmed over the Multitasking chapter in this book I am pretty sure I'll learn the important bits to be able to handle it. I somehow thing this book should have started with the multitasking chapter but I guess I understand why O'Reilly started with some more basic things such as Object allocation and memory related subjects.


The threads and timers chapter is useful. Once you pick the book up and see it for yourself, you'll get what I mean by "useful". The examples are the useful thing. The text is clear and really supports what is written in the example codes. I check Apple's documentation every now and then but after buying this book, I take it to work every day. It just sits on my desk and when I come back home it sits on my desk at home. If I need to find something quickly with a good example and text, I just refer to this book instead of trying to find it on the Internet. The reason behind that is I prefer to have something that has been tried out by somebody who knows what they are saying not a random dude sitting somewhere in the world who might not even have an iPhone and just base their talk on hypothesis. I think once you get this book you'll know what I mean. It will be a book you cannot say goodbye to.


The gyroscope chapter (which I think is the last chapter) is something that I have to explore more as I still haven't arrived at that chapter yet but it sounds exciting as I think gyro was added first on iPhone 4 and although I have an iPhone 4, I've never had a chance to explore using the gyro. I assume it's pretty cool and exciting especially for game devs.


My second favorite chapter is the Core Data chapter. I have always been using sqllite databases on my projects. The API is messy and really mind boggling at some points. Core Data seems to have fixed all those things. If you are reading this chapter, I suggest that you have a look at Chapter 3 (Table views) before this chapter because some of the examples in this chapter make use of Table Views and if you don't know how to use Table Views, chances are you will be really confused. The table views chapter seems to have covered everything relevant (although since I am comfortable with table views, I have't read that chapter, so don't take my work for it!).


One of the things I didn't like was the simplicity of the graphics chapter. I thought that chapter would cover a lot more but it was just a few recipes. I have to do some reading about graphics on my own I suppose but if O'Reilly is reading this feedback, I would like to kindly ask for more recipes on graphics, animations and eye-candy recipes like Quartz Core transformations and etc. Thanks.


I definitely recommend the book for anybody who wants to be (or already is) a serious iOS developer.

I purchased this book a few days ago and I've been reading through different parts of the book. I like O'Reilly's cookbooks because you can simply pick the things that you want to read about instead of being forced to read from the beginning.

This book is not for beginners though. I was smart enough (muhaha) to use the "Look Inside" feature of Amazon before making my purchase. If you open the app, the first thing you see the author say is this: "I assume you are comfortable with iOS" bla bla "This book does not get novice programmers started, but presents useful ways to get things done for iOS programmers ranging from novice to expert" And this is what I pointed out earlier. I know a bit iOS development but I'm not an expert so I still have some difficulty understanding memory management and object lifetime and etc in Objective-C. This book didn't help much with that except showing me a few examples. So if you are a real newbie, I suggest you start with something that goes into details about object creation and etc. But if you know a bit about iOS development, this is THE book for you.

Chapter 1 is all about objects and memory management. As I said, I still have some problems with object allocation and etc so I have to keep referring to other documentations as well as consulting this book. Chapter 2 is all about view controllers and tab bars. I knew about view controllers but didn't have much experience with tab bars. It also shows how to create split controllers for the iPad. Chapter 5 is another one of my favorites as it teaches all sorts of gesture recognizers. One suggestion for this chapter would be more *practical* examples. For instance, why should somebody use a Tap gesture recognizer? I think some more practical examples could really be useful in this chapter. After Chapter 5, one of the juicy chapters that I like is Chapter 7 which shows how you can use Operations. I was a "thread guy". I still am. I create my own threads, but after reading this chapter, I am starting to think that I've wasted a lot of time so far creating threads and should have read the material in this book far earlier than now. It's a really helpful chapter this chapter 7.

Address book was also a handy chapter (I think it's chapter 9!). One thing I find difficult about address book is that it is all C APIs created by Apple. I wish Apple could create an Objective-C wrapper around this framework. Some of the stuff in this chapter is just for iOS 4 (hence the book's name, DOH!) so be warned!

The Graphics chapter was not impressive. I was expecting a lot more in this chapter but as I said, I don't really want to spend more money on a 1000 pages book. I probably will have to purchase another book for this but just as a suggestion, it would be good to have some more material covered in the Graphics chapter.

So there, some pros and some cons. Overall, I am really satisfied with the book. I think it's a great book for those who want to just get the thing done and not worry too much about the implementation. What I suggest is more practical examples and in chapters such as Graphics, a lot more examples and material to be covered.

It's been a while and I had been looking for a book that will provide a pragmatic approach to writing code for iOS devices. I have been writing C code since Palm m100 days and have had quite a hands-on on Symbian S60, Pocket PC (Windows Mobile), BlackBerry and J2ME mobile devices, and that's why it had been so difficult to find a book that could help me to quickly move on to the iOS platform.

Having a very good knowledge of how mobile devices work, what their limitations are, and importantly a fair understanding of a life cycle of each mobile application, I had been looking for a book that will allow me to pick and choose general problems & find out how those can be addressed in the iOS platform using Objective C.

I bought a copy of this book about six weeks ago as I was quite impressed by its table of contents, which to my surprise highlighted almost every single task that I would like to know about while building an iOS application for e.g. allocating & initializing objects, managing memory with iOS SDK, displaying an image for the title of a navigation bar, enabling swipe detection, handling events of a map, downloading files asynchronously, accessing the address book, taking photos with camera, loading data using core-data, adding alarms to calendars, detecting a shake on an iOS device etc.

Now having almost, gone through all its chapters and having found each and every code snippet not only easy to understand, but also, easy to try out and see the results right then and there. Here are some comments that I would like to share with fellow programmers about this book

FOR

* Pragmatic - This book very well seems to be written for a programmer by a programmer as it contains tons of code snippets (the first one appears on page 3 itself) and cuts down on all that hunky-dory text that is generally associated with super guides.

* Exhaustive - It's quite exhaustive (around 600 pages) as it covers from basics to advanced tasks that a developer needs to implement in an iOS application. Every single task has a problem, its solution & a discussion (author's view) around it. For e.g. on page 103, it explains how to create custom table accessories followed by a discussion and a code example that clearly explains how to put that accessory into action.

* Evolutionary - The content begins with simple, basic problems and gradually covers advanced topics. I find this quite useful as it clearly allowed me to skip or skim through the sections for which I already knew the solutions.

AGAINST

* Not the first book if you are a beginner - Well, this is quite relative and what I mean here is this book should not be your first iOS book, if you have never developed any code using Objective C language & if you are not knowing how to work around XCode to create, compile and run an iOS application.

* Certain areas could have been described in full depth - Topics such as dynamic method invocation (page 26) or managing memory (page 27) definitely should have been explained in depth and with adequate illustrations, possibly diagrams (I find them easy to remember as well as co-relate across different platforms)

* Even though exhaustive, it's does not cover entire mobile application development spectrum - I personally would have loved to see and learn how to manage JSON objects, make SOAP requests and handle responses, manage push notifications, in-app purchases, create and display graphs, integrate Facebook & Twitter into my application, implement audio/video streaming, create some cool custom controls that I generally see in most popular applications. I guess the author is reading this review and would think of putting these in maybe the second edition.

In short, I would highly recommend this book to every iOS programmer who wishes to quickly get things done and learn by examples.

Pros:

- Covers iOS 4 Subjects
- A lot of useful examples, as another reviewer pointed out
- Text is simple to understand and not mangled with difficult words
- Tips and tricks are included in the book
- Sample codes are tested on ipad, iphone 4 and iphone 3gs

Cons:

- Some small screenshots in a few places. My eyes are not that perfect to see the small images!
- Gyroscope example lacks practical explanation. It doesn't say where we should actually use a gyroscope. A bit disappointing there.
- Might sometimes be hardcore and hence confusing.

This book really isn't for novice programmers. It literally says it in the book itself. I have a few apps in the app store and therefore, was able to digest majority of the material covered. But if you are a true beginner, you better look elsewhere. If you are a true beginner, you probably want to learn objective-c, not cocoa touch. Just search for "cocoa touch book" in google to see what books are best for that.

Operations and threads chapter is the best part of this book + multitasking and audio and video. The issue that I have is I don't actually have an iphone but I've developed some apps that make use of audio and video capabilities of iOS devices. If you open the Audio and Video chapter, you will see that the examples the author has tried are actually on an iphone 4 and some iPhone 3gs if I am not mistaken and because of this he has been able to deal with things such as "handling incoming phone call when you are playing an audio". This is the type of stuff I was looking for in a book and I found them here. I cannot afford an iphone for now but this book I could afford.

Core location and maps was also another interesting chapter. The good thing is when you mix this chapter with the Multitasking chapter. Then you get a good idea how you can for instance, detect the user's location even if your app is in the background. I can think of hundreds of app ideas that simply make use of the location apis and background processing. For example, detecting which bus stop is closes to the user and popping an alert on the screen saying "Hey, there is a bus stop 1/2 mile away from you". So I suggest that you definitely read the Multitasking chapter.

I liked the book. I think some improvements are necessary such as increasing the number of example codes in the gyroscope and accelerometer chapter. Other than that, I liked the book.

iOS 4 Programming Cookbook was the first of cookbook series I have ever read. The idea of this series is to present recipes that will allow you to "prepare" piece of code that does "something". Recipes are presented very consistent way through the description of the problem, answer for the particular problem and explanation of the given solution. Problems, that are discussed within the book, usually refer to issues that are elementary yet very commonly asked by introductory programmers. Book is divided into chapters that cover different aspects of iOS programming. You will find there answers to topics like view related issues, data management using Core Data, threading, multitasking, XML, and many other aspects of iOS 4 APIs. In general, I find this book interesting, however there are few drawbacks when it comes to details. First of all, you can't treat this book as the only source of knowledge when it comes to learning iOS programming. You should treat it as a reference for quite common problems that people encounter, but not as a complete guide to programming. I'd suggest here buying another book that describes topics in greater details (e.g. Learning iPhone Programming). Another issue here is that some topics may be very misleading. If you have never used Objective-C before you will probably find it difficult to understand it through "Working with objects" chapter. I think that this section could be skipped at all. It doesn't cover the Objective-C programming related techniques deeply. Even more, most of the topics that are discussed in this section you will find in any "programming in Objective-C" related title as well - but better explained. I would recommend this book only to people who want to have a starting point for some of the common tasks that have to be performed while programming any complex application. As a starting point for learning iOS programming - not really.