Book Review: iPhone SDK 3 Visual Quickstart Guide

[mark-...@aufflick.com]

Since Duncan won't shamelessly self-promote his own book, I'll do it
for him! Here's a re-post from my blog entry.

http://mark.aufflick.com/blog/2009/10/25/book-review-iphone-sdk-3-visual-quickstart-guide

CocoaHeads Sydney member Duncan Campbell has just published a book
with PeachPit press titled "iPhone SDK 3 Visual Quickstart Guide".
Like all of Peachpit's "Visual Quickstart Guides", the book is mostly
broken into two columns - text and images. At first I thought it would
suck! As soon as I got into it though, I quite liked the thin column.
It has readability like a newspaper, although it did make following
inline code a little tedious.

The book covered all the basics you need for making a great app, and
made some tricky tasks simple - like custom cells and multi-touch.

It avoids a common approach of many intro books where they continually
build into an ever evolving single app. Instead, each example is short
and entirely standalone. I have to say it was refreshing - it avoided
wasting time in frivolities and allowed the author to introduce
concepts at the time he chose, rather than the time it was needed to
continue building the app.

I also appreciated the time spent on one of the most important rools -
the Xcode interface. Even I learned a handy Xcode shortcut!

The choice to use code for UI layout instead of interface builder
makes the writing easier to follow, no enless 'click here, control
click and drag here...' and also avoids those madenning bugs where
you've missed a step but can't easily compare the compound result.
Similarly, the continual tweaks to IB won't invalidate the examples.

I also appreciated how each example was standalone - building and
running an interesting looking example didn't rely on carefully
building examples stretching back through previous chapters.

Two extra chapters can be downloaded as PDFs from the Peachpit press
website once you have the book covering the Address Book api and the
Media apis. The latter is very useful - covering saved images, using
the camera and playing audio and video.

While this is a book for people starting out with iPhone programming,
it's not for people who have never programmed before. If you have
programmed before but don't know at least the bare basics of one of C,
C++, Objective-C then I would suggest completing an introduction to
Objective-C first. Apple has one and there are lots of great books.

One of the positives above is that the use of code to create UI
controls is repeatable, easy to error check and shows how it all
works. Once you start building apps, though, you'll use Interface
Builder a lot. You'll need to brush up on that after completing this
book. Again, Apple has one and there are lots of great books! Aaron
Hillegass's Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X will cover both Objective-C
and Interface Builder really well - and you'll learn how to write
MacOS X apps to boot!

So in summary, it's a great book. I enjoyed it and you hopefully will
too! Available at Amazon and all good bookstores :)

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0321669533

Mark.

[objective-d]

Thx for the kind review Mark - where do I send the cheque?

I should also add that the source code for all the examples is
available on my site (http://objective-d.com) - while mostly small/
simple apps, there's some useful stuff if you are just starting out.

d.

On Oct 25, 7:56 pm, "m...@aufflick.com" <mark-co...@aufflick.com>
wrote:

> Since Duncan won't shamelessly self-promote his own book, I'll do it
> for him! Here's a re-post from my blog entry.
>

> http://mark.aufflick.com/blog/2009/10/25/book-review-iphone-sdk-3-vis...

[Mark Aufflick]

You can buy me a beer :)

I added a comment to the blog post with the url to the sample code.

--
Mark Aufflick
contact info at http://mark.aufflick.com/about/contact