Quick Review: Beginning iPhone Development

Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

I bought this book a few months ago, read it only once unlike the previous book "Programming in Objective-C 2.0". I began reading it shortly after the Objective-C book, and for anyone thinking to get this book I suggest buying another book on Objective-C then reading it first.

The book is divided into chapters that explain the different elements that can make up a iPhone Application. Every chapter has you build a basic iPhone Application to demonstrate the topic being discussed, like handling multi-view applications. For the most part the example programs are fairly straight forward and it does an okay job at explaining how and why things are being done the way they are. Though If you really want to understand it, you need to have atleast a basic understanding of Objective-C or all you will be doing is copy code without knowing what is going on.

The code your given for the most part is error free, and functions without issues. The author's website has download links to get the full projects and other files you may need. A thing that bothered me was the downloadable project files sometimes looked very then what was in the book, which could end up confusing some.

All in all the way it is written makes the book more useful for quick tutorials, if you want to add a given feature to your application. Say you wanted to add multi-touch capabilities, you could skip to the chapter that discusses touch gestures and read the explanations/examples. It's not really something you would read if you want an in-depth discussion on development for the iPhone or iPod Touch. I'm not saying you can't learn a lot from the book, but their may or may not be better ones out there for introductions to programing for the iPhone.

Pros:

• Well written error free code for most part.
• Covers a large variety of topics, almost anything you could have in an application.
• Clear cut examples to demonstrate the different elements of the application. 
• Example programs and other resources available online.
• Good for beginners to intermediates. 
  

Cons:

• Some topics could have been discussed more.
• Doesn't cover a lot of memory management techniques.
• At times if feels more like a step by step tutorial.
• Doesn't give end of chapter exercises or ways putting into practice what you learned.

From a scale of 1-10 I'd give it a 7.9 (Recommended)