Customer Reviews

iPhone Advanced Projects (Books for Professionals by Professionals)

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I DO NOT recommend this book at all for any level of iPhone developer(s).

One of the projects actually just takes an Apple code example and adds a few methods here and there. I don't have to buy a book to do that. One project adds some methods and ivar's to files that are generated files per Core Data. This is always a bad idea.

There are many mistakes in the source code in the book. The source code in the book doesn't match the downloadable source code in many places. The downloadable source code fails to build and is missing files. I found such obvious errors in the downloadable source like no semicolon at the end of some of the lines. This code was obviously never built and/or tested.

This book was very poorly and hastily put together. Don't waste your money, but more importantly, don't waste your time.

As the name suggested, this book talks about advanced iPhone programming topics. Each of the 11 chapters packs loads of information and real world experience from the authors. You will actually spend more time to digest the information than just reading it. Highly recommended to experienced and seasoned iPhone developers, but also offers quite some insights for developers new to the iPhone scene. You will be amazed on how much you can learn from the authors of the book. And lots of code samples throughout the book, you won't be disappointed.

Chapter 1 - Great introduction to the particle system, the very basic element for many types of games.
Chapter 2 - Interesting coverage on how to build a networked app/game, with the help of Google's free App Engine service using Python.
Chapter 3 - Using Core Audio to do audio streaming. This chapter is quite hardcore for me, but I was able to follow through and learned quite a lot about how audio streaming works and some tricks as well.
Chapter 4 - This chapter is right on the money - debugging! The author showed a few different approaches when debugging your iPhone apps.
Chapter 5 - This chapter covers basic SQLite operations in your codes. Currently there's no Objective-C delegate/wrappers for SQLite operations, so everything is in C fashion. There are other frameworks for a better interface with SQLite.
Chapter 6 - If you don't like dealing with SQLite, with the introduction of iPhone SDK 3.0, you can use Core Data :) This chapter shows you how Core Data and KVC protocol works.
Chapter 7 - How to send emails from your apps w/o going to the email client. The author shows both online and offline modes, as well as a nice introduction to three20 framework.
Chapter 8 - This chapter talks about networking issues, sockets, wifi detection, power management, etc. Also some insights if you want to roll out your own networking protocol stacks.
Chapter 9 - This is my favorite chapter talking about how to design an effective and responsive user interface. NSOperation and NSOperationQueue are covered, as well as tips & tricks on how to display large amount of data w/o slowing down.
Chapter 10 - Very nice introduction to Apple's push notification service, including both setup steps and server side scripts.
Chapter 11 - Mapping and Reflection on OpenGL ES. This is a brief introduction to OpenGL ES environment mapping and reflection. I wish this chapter is longer and has more coverage in depth. But again, this is not an OpenGL ES book, the topic itself deserves a whole other book.

Overall, this book is pretty advanced in many aspects of the iPhone SDK frameworks. Coverage on SDK 3.0 frameworks are much welcomed and the competence of the authors are undeniable. Again, I highly recommend this book to any iPhone developer, no matter how seasoned you are, you will learn a thing or two from this book.

Book was fantastic , actual useful and interesting topics, though some of the source did have bugs and leaks. Worth the price