Book Review: Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

18 Jan 2009

I just finished going through this book and thought I would share my thoughts on it. I picked up this book having pretty much zero xcode and objective-c knowledge. I took the time to read through Apple’s “The Objective-C 2.0 Programming Language” documentation before I got started on the book to make sure I picked up the gist of going from a rusty C++ background to Objective-C and other than a few surprises and disappointments (No garbage collection in Objective-C for iPhone) it didn’t take too long to get acclimated.

The chapters are organized into samples that you code through. You can download all of the source code from the website for the publisher if you don’t want to do the coding by hand, but I highly recommend you code them yourself. There are some nuances to the Objective-C syntax that you might get a better grasp on writing it yourself over and over for each lesson.

The book begins with a basic look at creating a view and getting information to and from interface elements. The pace picks up very quickly and in only a few chapters you have covered most of the view types and types of user interaction.

I was disappointed that this book does not really cover interacting with web services for more connected applications, but it does cover using the iPhone’s neatest gizmos like the accelerometer, the camera, the GPS, SQLite and accessing the address book and photos stored on the device.

The last few chapters of the book cover the more advanced features like multi-touch, gestures and using quartz and openGL for more advanced graphics.

I decided I wanted to play with writing an iPhone application and I feel like this book really gives you a solid foundation for developing on the platform. I do recommend you follow my lead on using Apple’s Objective-C documentation if you aren’t familiar with it. The book does do well to point out the iPhone specific nuances of Objective-C however.

I have since ordered a book on Objective-C from Amazon.com to add to my library as I get more familiar with the language.

I recommend this book to any beginning iPhone developer. I feel the content might be quite remedial if you are relatively familiar with the platform as it is all “getting used” to the different aspects of the device and its interactions.

Submit this post to