iOS 4 Programming Cookbook: Solutions & Examples for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Apps [Paperback]

Disclosure: I'm an O'Reilly Author and developer of the Great iPhone Development Video series. That being said, I'm not one for pulling punches when I see issues with with people's code (ask anyone I've ever code reviewed :).

This is the book I wish I'd had when I started developing for the iPhone. I started writing apps about two weeks after the infamous Apple Developer NDA was lifted and information started trickling out onto the Internet. If I'd have had a book like the iOS Cookbook I could have saved myself many hours of painful trial and error while learning Objective C and what is now the iOS API.

This is not really a book for a beginning iOS programmer. It's a book for someone who's done a couple of simple apps and has the basic idiom down. If you're looking to learn Objective-C or the mechanics of writing an iPhone app, this book will not help you. But if you can already write a functional app, the code snippets in this book will trim lots of time off of your learning curve when it comes to implementing more sophisticated features like Core Data, gestures, etc.

There are a few areas where the examples could be clearer, and it's clearly impossible to cover some of the more sophisticated functions of areas like Core Data in 620 pages. But overall this is an excellent REFERENCE for new and experienced app developers alike, and I'd recommend adding it to your library.

Disclaimer: The author is a coworker of mine at Monitise Group.

First things first: it's a good book. It's covers a lot of area, and it has a *lot* of usable sample code; there's an excellent chance that you can see things and immediately apply them to your own projects. It also covers the stuff which is a pain to find good information about online, such as the C frameworks (EventKit, AddressBook, etc). I know from experience that Apple's sample code for this tends to be unhelpful, and I spotted at least two flat out wrong things in Apple's AddressBook documentation last year, so having a good book for the C frameworks is nice. It also covers much of the iOS 4.0 stuff, such as multitasking. (Older books tend to either not cover it because iOS 4.0 only came out in June 2010, or they rushed it because they desperately needed to have something on the page about it. This book gives it a decent treatment.)

What's not so good is that the book tries to walk a tightrope between being a beginner book and an advanced book, and ends up in the middle somewhere. There's a lot of overview material, such as refreshers on the basics of retain/release memory management, that advanced iOS programmers will already know, but which have large gaps that less experienced programmers will fall into without even realizing it. For example (and only people who know some Objective-C will understand what I mean here), that overview of retain/release memory management gives a *paragraph* to autorelease, which mostly suggests using manual release instead. I can understand that argument and its advantages, even if I don't agree with it. However, the great majority of objects you deal with in an Objective-C app - including almost every NSString you make - were already autoreleased by Apple's code! If you don't know at least the basics of autorelease, I don't think you can write a program without mysterious crashes all over the place...and this book expects you to already know about it. If this is an advanced book, why was any space spent on the basics? If it's a near-beginners book, why do the overviews not teach you *everything* you need to know?

Bear in mind that this is a good book, even though I spent more time talking about the negatives than the positives; it's just that it cannot be your only Objective-C book. You *need* some experience in writing apps for iOS or the Mac before you can use it. I wish they'd taken out the basics, but them in some other book, and crammed in some more advanced-level material...but then, these days, if a book covered every 'advanced' thing in iOS in enough detail to make me happy, I'd have to take it off the shelf with a forklift.

I started reading the first chapter as soon as my book arrived; this chapter is about objects and memory allocation which I kind of am new to. So I did a bit of online searching to get some more details about things. Prety sure they didn't write everything in this book simply because they mentioned it is not for beginners and also because this book is already *hugetastic*.I can imagine how expensive this book would have been had they described every little thing in it. Anyway, I have now learned about object allocaion and deallocation and the whole object life-cycle but I still find myself struggling sometimes, so, my suggestion would be to include more subjects in this chapter to help newbies like me! Some of the titles that I really enjoyed which are covered in this book are things such as: taking a screenshot of the iOS device, drawing simple shapes, writing multitasking aware apps, using the gyroscope (this is really really new to me)

One of the things that I want to ask O'Reilly for the next release of this book is to include more photos as I have already mentioned. The more photos the merrier! To sum it up, this is an extremely useful book even if you are a novice like me but you just have to be smart enough to find some supplementary subjects online if you find out that the thing you are looking for isn't covered in this book (which again isn't necessarily for newbies but is darned helpful regardless!).

My suggestions for the book are ==> 1) add more example codes for typical object allocation and etc, just so that readers can learn objective-c without having to refer to any other reference.I know this is not an objective-c book but would be good if basics were all explained here.2) I want more examples for graphics, maybe some 3d graphics as well to make games, some physics and so on and so forth to help beginner game developers. Anyway, whatever the case, this book is proving to be a great asset for me and I look forward to referencing it over and over and over again :)

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