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Beginning IPhone Development: Exploring The IPhone SDK (2008)

by Dave Mark(Favorite Author)
3.72 of 5 Votes: 2
ISBN
1430216263 (ISBN13: 9781430216261)
languge
English
genre
publisher
Apress
review 1: one of the better books out there - it systematically goes through the basic mechanics of the SDK quite well. I couldn't believe how many errors there were in the book so no surprise there's a new edition! there is great forum support online but found the code still a bit buggy. IMHO, I don't think they needed the release of SDK3 as an excuse to write a new book. I would give the new book out to everyone who trudged through the first one for being beta testers :) all in all, dive in, you'll get some good ideas. my personal wish is for more emphasis on solid software engineering principles - the book would take the cake if it discussed even basics around version control and some really simple examples around how to build and run unit test cases - I feel it would make... more a difference to seed these practices in early rather than as an afterthought and help improve the quality of app out there - we all know how often they crash!
review 2: The strength of this book was introducing me to the basics of iPhone development without a lot of confusion. Objective-C, Cocoa Touch, Xcode, views and controllers, and Navigation and TabBar controllers are all covered in a way that provided me with the confidence that I can do this stuff.Then I try to write my first application that is on par with the examples from the book, fall flat on my face, and realize that copying-and-pasting code into my editor (or worse transcribing from the book) has taught me nothing. The bulk of the book is taken up by code which belongs in a download living on the net, and this code is then repeated amongst explanations. This is a nice example of literate programming, but that the literate part isn't in the code in comments. At this point, I realized that the true value of this book is the code examples themselves, not the explanations. The explanations are too simple to be very useful. This is truly a book for beginners.This text was very useful as a launchpad, but very quickly I found myself getting more out of the official Apple docs.Once past the chapters on controllers, some of the chapters seem phoned in. For example, some of the gesture-recognition code is broken while the text claims otherwise. less
Reviews (see all)
Chels
Excellent starter book for writing applications for the iPhone. I highly recommend it.
Chendi
Good examples. Working code. I like this the best of all the iphone books I have.
fern
A really good overview of iPhone development
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