The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK

There have been a lot of people slamming this book because it's not for beginners. But it's from Addison Wesley's Professional Developer's Library, so that should not be a surprise. What *is* a surprise is just how well written this book is -- taut prose, well edited, with a ton of useful tricks and tips on every page. I really hope it's updated to deal with iOS 4, this book deserves a long life.

Every other iphone book out there sticks to teaching the use of Interface Builder everytime you work on the GUI side of you app. That's totally insane. I bought this book, made it 4 chapters in and thought I wasted my money. I bought another book and a couple months in realized that all I learned was interface builder and how to make the most basic apps possible. I've gone back to this book and realized it was the only one I needed. Do not waste your time with making interface builder apps unless you are not a programmer or you are just looking to make a simple app over the weekend and probably never publish it. This book separates the real programmers from the people who pickup an IDE and think they can code because they can drag and drop GUI components. I would rather not have any books than not have this book. I would recommend buying it with the Learning Objective c book (from the same publisher) if you are new to the language. I find that it is not as simple to pickup as C++, Java or C# because the syntax is sort of odd. The learning objective c book will help with that. If you are a good programmer, are new to iphone development, are capable of making really good software and want to create complex apps, this is the only book you will need. If you are not a programmer (either literally or just think you are a programmer but really are not), are new to iphone and have never written software (on your own without using Google to find all your source code), go get one of the other books that teach drag and drop interface building, you will be lost with this book.

I am not sure what others are complaining about there are literally dozens of ideas you never find in any other iPhone book , this is one of the best books on the market. Erica's writing rocks, it is clear and clean.

I usually buy a book, flip through it, and rarely open it again. This book has been one that I refer to again and again. The examples are well written and focused. I find myself dog-earing many corners and finding just the code snippets that I need. As some reviews have mentioned, it assumes that you have at least some experience with Objective-C and Mac OS X programming. This is a good thing! Buy a book like the definitive Hillegass Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition), work through some of the examples, then come back to this book. It covers both basic API topics and looks under the covers to show you how some undocumented features work as well.

I have made my living from programming, which roughly equates into: I charge clients for my time. That said, I would imagine that we all place some sort of "value" on our time, and being from a (hopefully) empathic species, I place value on the time of others. It is from this basic perspective that I often find myself extremely grateful for the teachers, authors, bloggers and others who obviously love to share knowledge and often do so at no cost. I was excited to find this book by Mrs. Sadun, as I have come across her work while searching the web for solutions, and always found her information to be well informed and thorough. If anyone is on the fence about buying this book, visit her website and browse through the vast amount of information she makes available (at no cost by the way) and judge for yourself. Is the book completely perfect? Maybe not- but consider the value in finding a single nugget of information for $26. How much is that worth to you in your time? I can tell you I personally found several items in this book that I was able to either use completely as-is, or as a jumping off point to further develop from. As to the previous reviewer's comment's about some technical errors, I would like to point to Apple's own Documentation which is far from perfect and has been known to contain errors. That's why Apple and Mrs. Sadun post fixes and updates. Buy the book. And maybe (like I did) buy the pdf too. Be a contributor to those who share quality knowledge. I guarantee that if you read this book all the way through, you will find that it more than pays for itself- and probably several times over at that.