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Learning iPhone Programming
Get the hands-on experience you need to program for the iPhone and iPod Touch. With this easy-to-follow guide, you'll build several sample applications by learning how to use Xcode tools, the Objective-C programming language, and the core frameworks. Before you know it, you'll not only have the skills to develop your own apps, you'll know how to sail through the process of submitting apps to the iTunes App Store.Whether you're a developer new to Mac programming or an experienced Mac developer ready to tackle the iPhone and iPod Touch, Learning iPhone Programming will give you a head start on building market-ready iPhone apps.Start using Xcode right away, and learn how to work with Interface Builder Take advantage of model-view-controller (MVC) architecture with Objective-C Build a data-entry interface, and learn how to parse and store the data you receive Solve typical problems while building a variety of challenging sample a
356 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
About the author
Alasdair Allan
21 books2 followersAlasdair Allan is a British scientist, author, hacker, maker, and journalist. An expert on the Internet of Things and sensor systems, he’s famous for hacking hotel radios, deploying a 500-node mesh sensor network at Google I/O, and for revealing, back in 2011, that Apple’s iPhone was tracking user location constantly. He has written for Make: Magazine, VICE/Motherboard, Hackster.io, Hackaday, and to the O’Reilly Radar. A former academic, he also built a peer-to-peer autonomous telescope network that detected what was, at the time, the most distant object ever discovered.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 27, 2012
I generally like computer books from O'Reilly Publishing. But this book is a disappointment.
It seems to me that the general motivation of the author was to get into Table Views as quickly as possible. This is certainly an understandable motivation since Table Views are so versatile and provide a framework with which you can make just about any iPhone app. (For instance, the built-in mail program on all iPhones is basic example of a Table View app).
However, having read that far in the book (i.e., up through Table Views), I can tell you that I haven't really learned much about programming for the iPhone. Here's why: The book spends very little time explaining the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and it spends very little time explaining Objective-C. Objective-C only gets its one chapter, and MVC doesn't even get that.
Given that the goal of the book is to get to Table Views, how well could you be expected to understand them if you don't really understand Views (the "V" in "MVC")? Or view controllers (the "C" in MVC)? Or delegates, outlets, and actions (some of the ways in which the M, V, and C communicate with each other)? Much more time should've been spent describing the underlying MVC framework that every iPhone app uses.
A bigger strike against this book is that the Objective-C introduction is minimal. I would've liked more explanation of how pointers and objects are treated, more about properties (which are unique to Objective-C as far as I know), a better explanation of the dot syntax and how it relates to the square braces syntax, and -- most importantly for understanding how to read Objective-C code -- the naming convention for methods and their arguments (and the way in which they are interspersed together).
Without understanding these things, it is very difficult to read and understand Objective-C code (let alone write it!). In which case the remainder of the book becomes an exercise in just copying code and running it. All of the needed code is provided, and perhaps some people can learn to program that way: "this block of code implements this behavior" may be helpful in guiding you, and typing may be a good exercise in seeing syntax. But if I'm just copying from the text, then why not give me the code to copy and paste and just save me the time? I'd rather be told what each individual line of code does. To me it seems obvious that just because you can copy code and run it doesn't mean you are really learning the ins and outs of the language.
This book may work better for those that already have an Objective-C background. If you've never seen Objective-C before, then I recommend skipping this book.
Furthermore, it's now out of date. The book provides screenshots of XCode 3 and relies on those screenshots to show you how to implement your program, but XCode 4 is now out (as of the time of this review) and the screenshots will look completely different. Furthermore, the book spends time discussing memory allocation as it pertains to iOS 4, but iOS 5 does away with all of that.
Unless you already know Objective-C and you want to get quickly into working with Table Views in the now-dated Xcode 3 and iOS 4, then skip this book.
It seems to me that the general motivation of the author was to get into Table Views as quickly as possible. This is certainly an understandable motivation since Table Views are so versatile and provide a framework with which you can make just about any iPhone app. (For instance, the built-in mail program on all iPhones is basic example of a Table View app).
However, having read that far in the book (i.e., up through Table Views), I can tell you that I haven't really learned much about programming for the iPhone. Here's why: The book spends very little time explaining the Model-View-Controller (MVC) pattern and it spends very little time explaining Objective-C. Objective-C only gets its one chapter, and MVC doesn't even get that.
Given that the goal of the book is to get to Table Views, how well could you be expected to understand them if you don't really understand Views (the "V" in "MVC")? Or view controllers (the "C" in MVC)? Or delegates, outlets, and actions (some of the ways in which the M, V, and C communicate with each other)? Much more time should've been spent describing the underlying MVC framework that every iPhone app uses.
A bigger strike against this book is that the Objective-C introduction is minimal. I would've liked more explanation of how pointers and objects are treated, more about properties (which are unique to Objective-C as far as I know), a better explanation of the dot syntax and how it relates to the square braces syntax, and -- most importantly for understanding how to read Objective-C code -- the naming convention for methods and their arguments (and the way in which they are interspersed together).
Without understanding these things, it is very difficult to read and understand Objective-C code (let alone write it!). In which case the remainder of the book becomes an exercise in just copying code and running it. All of the needed code is provided, and perhaps some people can learn to program that way: "this block of code implements this behavior" may be helpful in guiding you, and typing may be a good exercise in seeing syntax. But if I'm just copying from the text, then why not give me the code to copy and paste and just save me the time? I'd rather be told what each individual line of code does. To me it seems obvious that just because you can copy code and run it doesn't mean you are really learning the ins and outs of the language.
This book may work better for those that already have an Objective-C background. If you've never seen Objective-C before, then I recommend skipping this book.
Furthermore, it's now out of date. The book provides screenshots of XCode 3 and relies on those screenshots to show you how to implement your program, but XCode 4 is now out (as of the time of this review) and the screenshots will look completely different. Furthermore, the book spends time discussing memory allocation as it pertains to iOS 4, but iOS 5 does away with all of that.
Unless you already know Objective-C and you want to get quickly into working with Table Views in the now-dated Xcode 3 and iOS 4, then skip this book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review