Pro iOS 5 Augmented Reality Paperback – Dec 7 2011

- the book is called pro io5 augmented reality but the sample code are in ios 4.3... cocoa2d and ios has changed a lot since than. Need to make many changes to sample code to even run on ios 5.1.
- doesn't explain things very well. Some contents seem to be copied straight from internet and put together as a book.
- pretty disappointed with Apress, my second book, the other one, pro drupal dev wasn't very good either. not worth the buck comparing with quality products like big nerd ranch.

bottom line: does have some useful examples but wasn't well written and if the sample code is not in ios 5 then shouldn't call it pro io5 augmented reality

Its an awesome book made very simple and intuitive and even though it's pro iOS series I think that anyone could read and follow successfully. What's even more importent is that it takes one of the hardest things for
Programmers working with ios today and makes it easy and available to all.
augmented reality is a heavy subject somehow made as easy as a walk in the park with this book, you can actually read almost half a book just by previewing it, so I advise everyone to NOT take my word and just see for themselves how awesome this book is
BTW
I own both digital and hard copy, my advice is to get the digital only it's way more efficient coz you can copy code snippets directly from the PDF to Xcode

gook book for designing code to address artificial intelligence simulations in development environments.

In the first 100 pages, it tell me all the hardware of ios device and how to use the seniors. And it gives simple example. Which is very very good, save me a lot of time in finding the material.

In the next 200 pages. it combine "cocos2D, Third-party toolkit, openGL, facebook API, openCV" . Which is not helpful.

If I know don't know these, I cannot figure it out but simply run the code. If I know these, why should I read this book ?

PS: the example code is easy to crash, like student demo program.

Disclosure I only finished Chapter 3.

I tried to start this book last Dec 2011 by starting on page 1. I was bewildered with the need to force learners, readers, into dealing with GIT command line code that quite frankly is poorly presented and the GitHub is the better place to go to learn this. Kinda says lets use GitHub to keep the example code fresh but lets document a dynamic on how to use GitHub. I gave up on using GitHub and find the word Pro should not mean you are forced into learning GitHub to use a book - really! I am quite happy with Beanstalk thank you. And I am quite happy downloading a compressed pile of examples to speed up going through material. Learning efficiency is compromised here. 3 hours wasted here.

Second is the book includes IOS5 but like a lot of IOS5 books written in 2011 their examples are no longer consistent with latest XCode compiler such as Storyboarding and with ARC (Automatic Reference Counting). As a result you will find following examples in the book will be challenging when you see deprecated entries like NSAutoReleasePool. So basically all the writing in the book and steps in the book about memory management are wasted. If you know ARC you can get around these.

Third the examples in Chapter 3 were good to fair. Not sure yet why the Simulator in the region monitoring example only showed the entering of the San Fransisco region once and never showed exiting the region. I suspect there may be other issues with the latest XCode or the examples were not tested for the normal second and third attempts. Just disappointing that that was 2 hours down the tubes.

The example for CLLocationManager in Ch 3 were decent, but there were two alternatives and it was not clear what is the best approach. Kinda taking a show and tell approach and skimping on application. A Pro book I would assume would direct the reader to what you should choose to put a location aware app together and succeed. At this point I have no clue about application success or failure on what was presented.

Writing is clear and following the steps is easy other than the attempts at Git.

OK as it stands alone in the topic Augmented Reality, but serious a better book needs to be done and brought up to date. Writing books for Apple IOS is tricky business and obsolescence can come even on the date of publication.

My rating is excluding the memory management obsolescence problem and is as of Chapter 3 if we did not have ARC and StoryBoards.