iPhone SDK Application Development: Building Applications for the Appstore

i am surprised by some of the reviews this book is getting. personally..i think is WONDERFUL book...BUT not for beginners. i think if you already have a handle on things, this book can REALLY push your understanding to another limit. if you want to be held by the hand..step by step then please dont get this book, i totally understand where the other reviewers are coming from( YOU DONT BUILD APPS WITH INTERFACE BUILDING IN THIS BOOK ... everything is from scratch 100% code ). ...this book is a MIRACLE.

I program for a living and this book lives up to the typical O'Reilly high-quality level. I just reached the end of an all nighter, struggling with a problem that this book solved for me in 3 minutes. A reader looking for a "coloring book" style, step by step, how-to book will be disappointed. Serious professionals looking for serious professional guidance will be glad they bought this book. Good work and thanks.

Full disclosure: I know the author online. But we get in occasional fights and I don't have any interest in inflating his score. I haven't finished reading the book yet but so far it's covered the basics pretty well, and I think I have a good understanding of MVC and how Interface Builder works from it. I have a fair amount of experience with some lower-level development but have done close to no "app development" work, so it was good to get those worked out. I don't expect I'll need all parts of this book, but it certainly appears to be a valuable resource especially given the scarcity of good information on the internet (this will probably change due to the lifting of the NDA, but it's always nice to have a big chunk of well organized knowledge in book form).

In January 2009, I purchased Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK (apress) mainly because it was the only book available that seemed promising in. I wish I had access to this first, the iPhone SDK: Application Development (O'Reilly) book, as it contains details of all of the interactions that I've been trying to develop on my own. If you are trying to decide between this book and the apress book, please read on...If not, skip to the Bottom Line. The apress book is great for beginners to get up to speed on the iPhone's functionality, but it lacks the basic components needed to complete the user experience that people have come to expect from most iPhone Apps. I was constantly soliciting help from other iPhone developers on Twitter for help with things like the Page Flick interaction because it wasn't written up in this book. It has lots of pictures of the iPhone sample programs running in the screen view, but this just means there is less room for explanations that could lead to something you or I can customize. This book, in my opinion, won't be enough to build a production ready program that will garner high sales in the iTunes App Store by itself... Bottom Line: Jonathan Zdziarski's iPhone SDK book provides fully detailed instructions to intermediate XCode programmers on how to construct and embed almost all of the iPhone's notable UI features: Date/Time Pickers, Progress / Activity Indicators, Proximity Sensors, Cover Flow, and the Movie Player Controllers to name a few. The book even covers network connectivity (CFNetwork) which is quintessential for data driven applications. The prospect of using rich media components such as video and page controls means that others will be adding these features to many iPhone Apps in the future and soon demand for those items will be commonplace. There aren't a lot of pictures of sample apps running, but that's where the examples come in and you can customize the code however you want. My bet is on the book that has sections dedicated to user experiences that most iPhone users will pay money to download. Plus, most software companies won't hesitate to pay top dollar for people who can actually build Cover Flow into their software either...

This book is an excellent crash course for experienced programmers wanting to become rapidly familiar with key aspects of the iPhone SDK. This book has 368 pages that have few pictures and is filled with very concise text. After the first few introductory chapters, most of the chapters are written in a style suitable to serve as a reference, albeit friendlier (and shorter) than Apple's documentation. Prospective readers should be warned that this book is not like the "...for Dummies" series of books that depend on a sequence of teaching points presented chronologically. This book is full of information, mostly to serve either as a reference, or to be read by experienced programmers. It requires the reader to understand the significance of the various APIs being described and used in sample code without the author making it overly obvious. This is in stark contrast to the "Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK" book by Mark and LaMarche, which is more tutorial based with more "hand holding". The Mark and LaMarche book is full of diagrams and depends on a teaching method of the reader following a carefully scripted sequence of teaching points. While the Mark/LaMarche book might seem easy to follow, the downside is that there is a lack of depth in their coverage of the APIs. CHAPTERS IN BOOK: 01. pg 001 Getting Started with the iPhone SDK 02. pg 027 Interface Builder: Xcode's GUI for GUIs 03. pg 039 Introduction to UI Kit 04. pg 115 Multi-Touch Events and Geometry 05. pg 131 Layer Programming with Quartz Core 06. pg 143 Making a Racket: Audio Toolbox and AVFoundation 07. pg 179 Network Programming with CFNetwork 08. pg 197 Getting a Fix: Core Location 09. pg 207 Address Book Frameworks 10. pg 219 Advanced UI Kit Design 11. pg 315 Application Settings 12. pg 325 Cover Flow 13. pg 335 Page Flicking 14. pg 349 Media Player Framework It is an excellent book, but completely novice programmers may want a more tutorial based introduction to the APIs. I find it to be complementary to the Mark and LaMarche book. It is impossible for either book, however, to cover all the extensive iPhone APIs completely. After using these two books, one will still have to use Apple's developer reference guides. As an aside, I should mention that even after using Zdziarski's book, the competing Mark/LaMarche book, and Apple's documentation, most novice iPhone programmers may still struggle to understand how to assimilate all of this into productive code, manufactured in part with Interface Builder. As an example, after using all three of these different types of resources, it was still quite difficult to produce an iPhone application that used a tab bar controller with separate table views with navigation bars. After I figured this out using Interface Builder (as opposed to programmatically), it seems so easy and logical in retrospect, but there are no current resources that assimilate coverage of the APIs with more fundamental concepts