Customer Reviews

iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I've been looking to get into iPhone OS development this spring, and most books I've come across have fallen into one of two categories:

1) they expect you to have a background in Mac OS X's Objective-C development frameworks or...

2) they're written like a reference book and thus make it difficult to learn the ropes in a step-by-step fashion.

Craig Hockenberry's iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual changes that frustrating pattern. By introducing the world of developing an iPhone app in a way that requires just a bit of programming experience, Hockenberry makes instantly accessible the Objective-C language, the XCode IDE, and the design processes that go into taking your app from notepad sketch to App Store success and beyond. The text is clear and approachable, and Craig's jolly writing style makes grasping important concepts and following along with examples both fun and memorable.

I highly recommend this book to anyone with any C-like programming experience who is interested in writing apps for the iPhone OS.

As the series tag says, this book should have been included in the Xcode box. I haven't finished reading it but it already has provided me solid nuggets of information that I had not yet gleaned in a couple of years of iPhone development and has saved me dev time and improved my implementation cleanliness (many thanks to the author for that).

Prior to getting this book, I had been aware of the author's sage advice on his blog and twitter feed. The author is the real deal and this book does not disappoint.

Building an iPhone app from start to finish, this book explains the dev environment, language, app design and app management process, while simultaneously managing to discusses the pros and cons of various tradeoffs you need to make an app. I am impressed at its conciseness and the conveyed depth of understanding of what it takes to get a robust, shipping product. The specific information about using the command line versions of various Xcode tools is something that I haven't seen elsewhere and am finding it extremely helpful.

If you are looking to polish your iphone app dev skills, or just make them more AWESOME!!!, this book will help.

My job suddenly required me to do iPhone development, so I got this book in hopes that it would cover most of the major aspects of the iphone sdk. Instead book starts out with a "flashlight app" template that you don't actually have to write any code for (it's literally an empty project that you hit compile on), then spends the next few chapters going over basic obj-c, making crappy cardboard cutouts of an iphone to help you "get the feel" of the program flow (seriously!), and a bunch of other nonsense that shouldn't be in a programming book. Then it randomly jumps back to the flashlight app for one chapter where the author tries to turn it into a real app, with menus and whatnot. This chapter would have been useful if it was actually written in a way that amounted to more than just "ok you do this and this and you're done." The book then goes on to how to get your flashlight app in the app store for the remainder of the book. Just about everything is infuriating about this book - the chapter organization, the lack of any real iphone development instruction, the fact that every other sentence contains the word "awesome" or some lame joke. They should change the name of this book to "AWESOME Flashlight Apps: The AWESOME Missing Manual AWESOME".

I'm currently reading "The iPhone Developer's Cookbook," which is actually much more informative and sticks to actual iPhone development for the majority of the book.

This book covers the ins and outs of development for the iPhone environment and does that well. Where I feel it really excels is where it covers the areas that immediately surround the development, the parts that aren't just "how to write the code and use the libraries".

The options that are available for structuring a project are many but sometimes choosing the simplest winds up leaving you in a straightjacket further on through development. Hockenberry finds a good balance of trying to keep things as simple as possible but not so simple that there's no flexibility. Each time I took off and did things without consulting the book I'd find myself wishing I'd taken a little more time to take on his wisdom first. For example, the discussion on how to leave space so you can work with outside designers to do the images for a project and bring those into development are great.

Where I felt the book really gave me an enormous head start was in dealing with the certificates that Apple use for signing apps when transferring them to the iOS devices and uploading to the app store. The canny and thoughtful coverage of this tar pit saved me hours of time and effort (and hair) and this aspect alone made the book absolutely invaluable.

Another topic I haven't seen covered elsewhere is tracking the sales of your application using the iTunes store and the tools there, the impact that different strategies have on the sales of the app and so on. it's all well and good to talk about how to do the coding but it's getting your app to as many people as possible which drives development. It's almost a relief to find someone shining a light here and talking about it coherently.

Once I had the hang of app development, this was a book that I kept by my side and constantly referred to.

This book is not for the beginner on iPhone programming. The tutorials and sample code require the reader to already be quite familiar with Objective-C, and the author does not provide clear explanations. The FEW sample programs only provide a limited introduction to the features available in iPhone programming, and are difficult to implement. However, the book does provide useful information regarding the Apple Developer site and submitting Applications to the App store.

There are plenty of technical books about iPhone development, some great ones, but none that I've seen like this one. This book addresses important aspects of the Apple iPhone Developer program and ecosystem. Given that Apple's program is web based and constantly improving, some of this book's steps are outdated, but don't let that stop you. There is a wealth of information you simply will not get from any other book. When developing a bigger application for the iPhone, I took some time out to develop a simple utility to test the App Store process, and learn the hard way what things I needed to do to get ready for my bigger app. I discovered a lot, the hard way. Had this book come out 6 months earlier, all I needed to know, all I learned in my test and far more, all of that would have been simple, clear, and concise. Even having developed some apps, this book was a great resource.

Craig Hockenberry is a well known and talented developer, and when he started talking on Twitter about the best flashlight app, I was confused. I'd followed him a while, and a flashlight app simply didn't seem up to his or the Iconfactory's previous work. This book does. It is AWESOME!

My review is not to negate the 5-star reviews, but I'm already totally frustrated with this book. The author starts off with a really simple template project (flashlight app), but then he spends like the next three chapters explaining Objective-C without using or referring to any exercise to help beginners make sense of what he is explaining. At the beginning of some sections he says, By now you have a good understanding of such and such; and I'm thinking, I do? Why not refer back to the flashlight app code to explain the language?

I'm heading back the Dummies book on Objective-C. This one is clearly not for beginners.

This is a great book for new iPhone application developers looking for a good place to get started. Even if you're familiar with C or C++, Objective C takes a little bit of getting used to. This book takes the reader through the entire development lifecycle of an iPhone application--from the very beginning with installing Xcode and the iPhone SDK, through the end with getting your application released in the App Store.

While the book is not designed to be comprehensive, it won't be the reference that intermediate or advanced iPhone developers will be looking for. However, for those just getting started, it's just right. After showing how to configure the Xcode environment, the author goes through the basics of Objective C and the ins and outs of the language. The author proceeds through the process of how great iPhone apps are designed. Finally, the author shows how to submit your application to the iTunes store and what to expect out of the process. You won't find a lot of coding examples, aside from the Objective C introduction. In other words, there aren't any "how-to's" in this book, which is fine, since much of that can be retrieved online.

Where I really felt this book provided value was in the overall discussion of how to begin, design, and submit your application. There aren't a lot of good references out there which show the whole process, and I found this book to be one of the best. I'd recommend this book to developers who want to get started with iPhone development--especially those developers who just installed Xcode and are asking "now what?".

There are a lot of books that will teach you about Cocoa and developing an application for the iPhone, but few of them are written by a developer with Hockenberry's experience. Craig has not only created one of the handful of iPhone applications to win an Apple Design award, he has been through the app development cycle from start to finish many times. You just are not going to find the valuable and practical advice he has to offer in this book anywhere else.

This book is CHOCKLOCK full of excellent tips and advice. I've had my hands on Cocoa and the iPhone for quite a while and I'm amazed at how many great tips I've found in this book. It covers the usual things like tools and libraries but excels in its coverage of design and polish. If you're looking into iPhone/iPad development for the first time or even if you consider yourself a pro, you'll find more than a few gems inside this book to make it worth the purchase.