“This book would be a bargain at ten times its price! If you are writing iPhone software, it will save you weeks of development time. Erica has included dozens of crisp and clear examples illustrating essential iPhone development techniques and many others that show special effects going way beyond Apple’s official documentation.”
“Erica Sadun’s technical expertise lives up to the Addison-Wesley name. The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook is a comprehensive walkthrough of iPhone development that will help anyone out, from beginners to more experienced developers. Code samples and screenshots help punctuate the numerous tips and tricks in this book.”
—Jacqui Cheng, Associate Editor, Ars Technica
“We make our living writing this stuff and yet I am humbled by Erica’s command of her subject matter and the way she presents the material: pleasantly informal, then very appropriately detailed technically. This is a going to be the Petzold book for iPhone developers.”
—Daniel Pasco, Lead Developer and CEO, Black Pixel Luminance
“The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK should be the first resource for the beginning iPhone programmer, and is the best supplemental material to Apple’s own documentation.”
—Alex C. Schaefer, Lead Programmer, ApolloIM, iPhone Application Development Specialist, MeLLmo, Inc
“Erica’s book is a truly great resource for Cocoa Touch developers. This book goes far beyond the documentation on Apple’s Web site, and she includes methods that give the developer a deeper understanding of the iPhone OS, by letting them glimpse at what’s going on behind the scenes on this incredible mobile platform.”
—John Zorko, Sr. Software Engineer, Mobile Devices
The iPhone and iPod touch aren’t just attracting millions of new users; their breakthrough development platform enables programmers to build tomorrow’s killer applications. If you’re getting started with iPhone programming, this book brings together tested, ready-to-use code for hundreds of the challenges you’re most likely to encounter. Use this fully documented, easy-to-customize code to get productive fast—and focus your time on the specifics of your application, not boilerplate tasks.
Leading iPhone developer Erica Sadun begins by exploring the iPhone delivery platform and SDK, helping you set up your development environment, and showing how iPhone applications are constructed. Next, she offers single-task recipes for the full spectrum of iPhone/iPod touch programming jobs:
Utilize views and tables
Organize interface elements
Alert and respond to users
Access the Address Book (people), Core Location (places), and Sensors (things)
Connect to the Internet and Web services
Display media content
Create secure Keychain entries
And much more
You’ll even discover how to use Cover Flow to create gorgeous visual selection experiences that put scrolling lists to shame!
This book is organized for fast access: related tasks are grouped together, and you can jump directly to the right solution, even if you don’t know which class or framework to use. All code is based on Apple’s publicly released iPhone SDK, not a beta. No matter what iPhone projects come your way, The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook will be your indispensable companion.
Book Review from Silicon Valley Web Builder I started iPhone programming with the reference resources on Apple Developer web site. The sample code there are great, but does not have full coverage of all aspects of developing and application and is rather hard to remember which sample app uses which feature(s). I'm hoping that the iPhone Developer's Cookbook would be a better reference material. In some cases, it is. For example, the multi-touch "recipe" is excellent. I followed the example and was able to quickly implement two of my applications that utilizes multi-touch in the user interface.
However, the quality of the different recipes varies. Some are just plain wrong, but fortunately the author has a web site that provides the corrected code. One obvious missing piece is what foundation libraries need to be linked into a project for certain recipes to work. This will reduce the amount of time I need to figure out which libraries to include in the build.
A better index at the end of the book would be nice as well.
Get's you going quickly, not for first-time programmer though I liked this book, it was my first iPhone development book and it got me up and running with some interesting examples quite quickly. The author took a couple of shortcuts that might be called "agile" but I think a competent developer will understand even if you have no prior experience with Objective-C (like myself). I would like to see more books from this author on iPhone development.
This book is a little out of date, but good for intermediate level cocoa programmers As a long time cocoa developer moving to the iPhone, I found this book to be fairly useful (if you can get past the horrendous editing). I wouldn't recommend it to developers new to Apple's platforms though.
Don't buy on an iPod Touch or iPhone!!!!! This product is not completely visible on an iPhone or iPod Touch rendering this book completely useless. You'll wonder why the examples don't work for you. The reason: you can only see about half the book!!!!!
DO NOT BUY FOR AN IPHONE OR IPOD TOUCH!
Don't waste your money. This book relies far too heavily on undocumented APIs and third-party add-ons, both of which will break whenever Apple updates the OS. Essentially, she does everything wrong that she could if she wanted a book that would allow someone to learn to write programs that will continue to work on an evolving platform.
I would return it if I could. Absolute waste of money.
Anything Goes Trivia
Trevor
Megaton Man
