Customer Reviews

iPhone SDK Programming: Developing Mobile Applications for Apple iPhone and iPod touch

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

 

 

I bought this book after I'd gone through Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK (Beginning from Novice to Professional), hoping to get another set of useful skills and tools to use, such as a reference for XML & RSS, SQLite, and a little more depth on the collections objects such as NSArrays, etc. that was only brushed over in the Beginning iPhone Development book. Overall, this book does fill in some of those gaps, but it really doesn't stand well as a standalone iPhone programming book. I'm glad this is my second choice, because if it were my first I'd probably be more confused!

If you're building your foundation, this book may be worth your while.

My largest complaint about this book is actually the way the code is written out on the page. Instead of clear, Courier-font code blocks, the editors just stuck code in Times Roman font. Anyone who's ever read their share of programming books knows this just complicates life by making it harder to differentiate code from content and better recognize typos, etc. I hope they revise this and publish another edition of the book - it's extremely noticeable. Also, I think this book was pushed to market without double-checking that the graphic examples are copyright compliant, because instead of icons in some of the screenshots the author substituted ugly character graphics that just looked dumb.

Overall, this is an okay programming book. There are some nuggets of good information, but as a beginner's book it's too complex, nor does it have enough depth to be a compendium for an advanced programmer.

Warning this book is designed for advance Iphone developers. If you are a beginner then stay away from this book. The author style of writing is very hard to understand and the way the code is presented in this book is really hard on the eyes. The author somehow decided to use Time Roman Font instead of the standard Courier or Arial font, therefore it makes the code even more complex to understand and follow. The graphics and screenshots served little purpose. I am glad there is not too many of them. I bought this book to learn more about Parsing XML documents using SAX and DOM, and developing database application using SQLite engine, but later found out that I learn more by using online resources rather than the book itself.
The author said one thing and he assumes the other. For example: The last paragraph in the preface "Is This Book For You?" the author wrote, "The text cover general topics such as databases and XML processing. These topics are covered assuming minimal or no prior knowledge." Chapter 10 working with databases second paragraph the author then wrote, "This chapter is not an introduction to databases and it assumes that you know the basics of Structured Query Language (SQL)."At first he said no prior knowledge is required to learn databases then when it comes to the actual section on working with databases he said that he assume you know the Structured Query Language. I guess that is one way to get you to buy the book if you only read the preface.

I did not like the book at all. The topics are not discussed well. The examples are lacking. The author assumes you already know the material. So if I knew it already, I wouldn't need to read it. Don't waste your money.

It's not uncommon when dealing with rapidly evolving and trendy technologies to see publishers pull out all the stops and rush relevant titles through the publication process, but this title is worse than most. The organization is terrible, the prose is rambling, the examples are trivial at best, and the illustrative screenshots were done so quickly that real-world names and data have been "redacted" with black lines. This book should be labeled a "rough draft" or "galley proof" and should never have made it to a bookshelf. There are a few, isolated, redeeming qualities, such as a decent chapter on iPhone file systems and database integration, but they are the exception and not the rule. It's a shame, too, because if Ali had spent more than five minutes per page, he might have been able to generate some real, relevant copy. There's an updated version coming toward the end of 2009, so may it be better then. But as a collegiate instructor who has taught iPhone development, there are far far better titles to spend your money on.

I bought this to get started with iphone development. I am an experienced web and .net developer. The book takes a sequential approach, starting with objective-C stuff, moving into iphone development concepts. I read through the objective-C stuff, and started typing in the first iphone example. It didn't work and it was very unclear how to get it running. Also the code example (as other reviewers have pointed out) are horribly formatted with proportional font. Another critical issue is that it seems to written with no view to practical application, for example, the first examples build UI element from code as opposed to introducing the InterfaceBuilder tool.

If you are programmer looking to get into iphone development, I do not recommend this book. I instead got the "Mark/LaMarche" book which is much better structured and I am learning much faster with that one.

The book has some good points to it but is very difficult to read. The style of the book and explaination of objective-c and iPhone frameworks are in there but difficult to find the information you want in an organized fashiion. I think you would be better off reading articles on the apple website and looking through the sample code there.

I just got done with chapter 1 of this book, and there are 5 "problems" at the end.
After writing out my answers, I flipped to the back of the book and found no answers.
I just looked on line at the URL for downloading the source code, and I don't see
anything that appears to be the answers to these chapter problems. If the answers
don't exist, then it's pretty lame. If they do, and I can't find them, that's also
pretty lame. I'm not sure why they wouldn't be in an appendix of the book.

I'm going to have to try these code snippets for the end-chapter problems from within
xcode, I guess.

It's an interesting glimpse into programming for the iPhone OS, but my excitement for
the next few chapters is starting to wane.

I am an iPhone developer and this book doesn't seem to hit any audience. It covers little of the basics so the book isn't useful to beginners. But the book's examples are mundane and "internet quality" - meaning I can find any of these example snippets with a simple internet search. Most of the book is actually example code with little text explanations. I find myself skipping through pages and pages of code - how many times do I need to see class declarations, import statements and properties declared and synthesized? Leave that material out of the book and leave it where it belongs - in the code. This book would be 1/2 the size and still not worth the read.

I didnt find this book very readable. The author focuses on too many facts and there is no build up in examples or any flow as you go through the chapters. Sometimes concepts are used w/o explanation and maybe the author assumes that the reader is familiar with either Cocoa or XCode. If you are not familiar with Objective-C, which has a pretty interesting syntax (if you are a C/C++ or a Java programmer the experience would be the same) then this book may not work for you. The author covers these topics very quickly jumping through different concepts.

I had high hopes for this book considering there are only a few out there that cover this topic. I've read what I can of the book, tried to follow the code examples and have not made any major progress in learning iPhone development.

First, the code examples that can be downloaded from Google mostly do not work or are incomplete.

Secondly, as others have stated, the code in the chapters is extremely hard to read.

Finally, there's no real "meat" to this book, simply a set of chapters that take a high-level approach to fairly complicated information.

My guess is that the author (and publisher) pushed this book out fast to get to market. Maybe a revision would be worth the money but personally it would require a complete re-write to make it worth reading.

On a good note, the cover and high quality glossy paper look great. That's where the second star comes from. Can't judge a book from its cover...