iPhone Cool Projects [Paperback]

Gary Bennett (Author), Wolfgang Ante (Author), Michael Ash (Author), Benjamin Jackson (Author), Neil Mix (Author), Steven Peterson (Author), Matthew "Canis" Rosenfeld (Author), Dave Mark (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 143022357X | ISBN-13: 978-1430223573 | Publication Date: August 13, 2009 | Edition: 1

iPhone Cool Projects is the first book to use real applications from the iTunes App Store to demonstrate the tricks of iPhone application development. The iPhone has quickly become the coolest new platform for application development, and developers with all levels of experience and from all development environments are eager to learn how to do it. Not only is there money to be made for developers selling cool iPhone apps, but it’s just a hell of a lot of fun for everyone involved.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ten authors; ten successful iPhone developers; each with a unique story.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (August 13, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143022357X
• ISBN-13: 978-1430223573
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #539,441 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Worth buying, but can be hit and miss, August 13, 2009

By 

ddd - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: iPhone Cool Projects (Paperback)

It's an attractive, slim book with plenty of full color graphics. There are probably enough tips, tricks, and 'from the trenches' stories to justify a place on most iPhone developers' shelves.

I think the book would have been better with a more consistent overall style/structure. Most of the example code is too large and involved to bother inputting yourself, yet there are many, very basic, pictures showing IB connections etc. The code is available for download and I'd expect a book at this level to provide:

- the code itself (yes, on the website)
- class diagrams* or at least some form of architecture diagrams for each project (not really; depends on the chapter)
- detailed discussion of problems encountered, alternatives considered, blocked avenues etc (also hit and miss)
- specific discussion of code snippets (yes, this is covered fairly well)
- a comprehensive appendix of references, or links on the website (no, though you can glean a reasonable amount from the chapters)

[*yes, you can generate class diagrams in Xcode but I'm thinking along the lines of storyboard/whiteboard, "how we got here" views, as well as simply outlining what the demo is and what it does]

Six of the seven chapters deal with real world projects, or working cut-downs. The threading chapter is, for me, the weakest since it uses a toy problem just to illustrate threading, is poorly explained and smacks of 'solution in need of a problem'. Given that it walks the user through the whole setup of IB connections etc I fear that it may be handing a loaded gun to some people who would be well advised to look for ways to avoid threading (or at least not write to common data), rather than dive in with threading. It would have been possible to present a small, real world problem, that legitimately called for a threaded solution without too much effort.

The code I've seen is based on 2.2.1, so you'll probably need to do some tweaking. There is breadth and depth so it's hard to imagine someone coming away without learning something. For $27 or so it's a good deal and a step in the right direction for post-beginner iPhone dev books.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your next step in iPhone SDK programming, October 4, 2009

By 

H. Wu "Code Shogun" (Silicon Valley, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: iPhone Cool Projects (Paperback)

I have to admit I initially overlooked what a great book it is, given its meager 200-page content ;)
When I got the book, I thought: oh nice paper and colorful prints. But maybe it just looks fancy instead of offering real substance.
I was wrong. Once I started reading, I couldn't put the book off. While reading it, it's both satisfying and addictive at the same time.
All the chapter authors have practical real-world experience building successful iPhone apps.
They showed you complete working programs while demonstrating their experience and expertise in their respective fields.

Wolfgang Ante - Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game
It shows you how a little game is built from concept to finish, with complete game flow, handling on different logic/paths, and how to use Quartz and Core Animation to build simple animations w/o using Open GL ES. I really liked how he also revealed his thought-processing in designing the game.

Mike Ash - Mike Ash's Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
Peer-to-Peer networking using Bonjour is very interesting. Mike not only showed how Bonjour/CFNetwork works, but also went ahead to build out a simple yet effective network protocol to demonstrate his point. It's very thought-provoking and reminded me poking UNIX networking stuff back in my college days. I'm very eager to try out some p2p trick in my next app after reading this chapter!

Gary Bennett - Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
This chapter is a bit *easy*. It shows you how to work with multiple threads, and showed a simple program to demonstrate different points.
However, I was expecting some more *real-world* app, instead of a toy program.

Matthew "Canis" Rosenfeld - All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation
Matt has done a wonderful job in explaining how to handle gesture events in great details, as well as how to make the decision of what events to use during his design of Stage Hand. This is a great chapter for anyone who wants to design how to capture their own custom gesture events.

Benjamin Jackson - Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
Cocos2d is a very popular physics game engine on iPhone. Ben leads us to the door in this chapter. Cocos2d along deserves a whole book for it.
I really would like to have more content on this chapter. 20 pages just don't cut it ;)

Neil Mix - Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
Neil has a great piece in explaining how to design an effective audio streaming algorithm in this chapter. Coming from the Pandora team, I expect nothing but greatness from his experience and expertise. Handling slow network and dropped connection are very interesting to read.

Steven Peterson - Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite
This is a good chapter, comparing to others in the book. Probably I've already built apps using CoreLocation, XML Parsing and SQLite, I find it an easy read. But it's still pretty good in showing you how to build an app from start to finish.

Overall, this little book offers more value than many 600-plus-pages of bible-books out there on the market.
I highly recommend it to anyone who's passed the initial iPhone SDK programming newbie stage, and ready to take on more advanced features.
I just wish this book would contain more chapters and more interesting topics. Hopefully APress can come out with a new edition?

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good threading and multitouch walkthroughs..., August 12, 2009

By 

John McSwain "Compound J" (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: iPhone Cool Projects (Paperback)

iPhone Cool Projects is a very broad and deep iPhone development composition. The book is broken into 7 chapters, which are roughly 20-25 pages in length.

For new iPhone developers, Apress provides the source code for each chapter's project to help those of us that like to learn by seeing the code work, and only then decomposing it into various pieces for learning purposes.

Without going into gross detail, I mainly bought the book to gain some insight into threading, multitouch interface design, audio streaming. For brevity, I'll limit my assessment to threading only. The chapter opens by describing the taxonomy of threading and several keywords such as thread, process, multitasking, synchronization, deadlock, etc. After the description, the chapter walks you through the steps AND color graphics of each of the XCode screens. There are LOTS of diagrams to explain the setup and the arrangement of threads in the example project as well. In the past, when books have very intense globs of code, there is something lost when attempting to explain each line. iPhone Cool Projects actually does a decent job of walking through the connections to UIControl objects and completing tasks such as an event processing loop or implementing a critical section.

If you are a skeptic and want to see more before committing to purchasing this book, the publisher has generously provided a sample chapter (Chapter 5) to entice you to buy.