5 Responses to “Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK”

1. ipo says:

   July 23, 2010 at 3:05 am

   I wish the authors stopped being so cute and spent more time teaching rather than being so humorous. This book is a decent introduction to the SDK but I find their writing irritating.
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2. B. Butler says:

   July 23, 2010 at 4:12 am

   Let me just say I had written a 1 star review and it looks like it has been removed.

   I’ll make this one short and to the point so that no one will cry.

   This book is full of errors and was written for 2.0 SDK. It was a total waste my time and money. This review is MY OPINION and MY OPINION ONLY!!! IT IS A REVIEW FROM MY EXPERIENCE.
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3. Sam Smith says:

   July 23, 2010 at 4:54 am

   The more I get into this book the more frustrated and annoyed I become.(see rest of review) I finally found peace when I found this website: iPhone SDK Articles at
   
   http://www.iphonesdkarticles.com/2008/07/first-iphone-application.html
   
   This presents the information in concise no nonsense manner with no nauseating cutsey-wootsy comments. Save yourself a lot of frustration by skipping this book and going directly to this website. It really is the best introduction to the iPhone SDK. I have no affiliation with the website.

   I find it difficult to believe that this book has received so many 5 star ratings. What does Amazon do to insure that these ratings are legtimate and not given by friends of the author?

   The sample code I’ve looked at so far is really quite bad. The animation in the rolling marble code is really terrible. The marble’s motion is very jerky. I know that it is possible to get better animation than this. Couldn’t the authors have researched the correct way to do animation instead of just putting up the most naive implementation.

   I also have a problem with how verbose the book is. There is a lot of throat clearing and filler and cutsey wootsey comments.

   For example consider this section:

   “Before we hop over to Interface Builder we need to figure out which of these objects requires an outlet….”

   No,we don’t have to “figure it out”. Just tell us.
   
   He goes on for TWO paragraphs telling us what DOESN’T need an outlet.
   
   “Does this need an outlet,” the authors ask coyly. “No, it doesn’t,” they reply. “How about this? Nope. And that? Nope!” and on and on. Cripes! I don’t care what doesn’t need an outlet. Just tell me what DOES.

   After keeping us in suspense for those two paragraphs the authors let us in on the secret:

   “On the other hand the two text fields aren’t really much use if we can’t get to the data they contain. The way to access the data held by a passive control is to define an outlet for each of these two text fields.”

   Outlets have already been explained in the previous chapter. The authors didn’t need to explain that “the way to access data … is to define an outlet unless they are getting paid by the word. How about just saying: “We have to define outlets for the two text fields.”

   The authors took around 150 words to say what can be said in just the ten words above.

   The sample code also seems to indicate that the authors are being paid by the line.
   
   For example in the persistence chapter the authors create a program that has FOUR UITextFields whose data is persistent. Why four identical GUI controls? Why not just one? They simply duplicate the code four times over.
   
   It is needless complication.

   This book is around 500 pages long but could easily be edited down to 200 pages or so.

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4. S. Walker says:

   July 23, 2010 at 6:33 am

   This book is NOT for the beginner. If you are not familiar with C/C++/Obj-C, I wouldn’t recommend this book. Furthermore, it is FULL of typos; most likely from the publisher. I type in the code examples and got errors. I wrote the author and he recommended I use the forum on his site. So, I joined the forum, stated my error(s) in a message, and people answered. Every few pages, I was having to go into the forum and ask about problems I was having with the code. After having done this several times, I noticed that the community was writing the authors with suggestions of a better way to write certain code snippets. The author(s) response was usually, “At the time of writing the book, we had a reason for writing the code that way. Probably due to a previous version of…”. Part of that was probably true but, to me, it seemed like they always have an excuse for problems in the book.

   I will say, however, that the book is very well explained in step-by-step detail. The authors explain why every new snippet of code was used. That is the ONLY good thing I have to say about this book.
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5. R. Laranang says:

   July 23, 2010 at 8:33 am

   I bought this book as a gift for my husband.. he read all the reviews from other people and was really excited to get it, but he started reading it and found out part way into the book that you have to have a Mac computer to do the programming.. it didn’t say that anywhere that he read so now he’s disappointed and can’t use the book because we don’t have a Mac.
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