iPhone Advanced Projects Review

As the name suggested, this book talks about advanced iPhone programming topics. Each of the 11 chapters packs loads of information and real world experience from the authors. You will actually spend more time to digest the information than just reading it. Highly recommended to experienced and seasoned iPhone developers, but also offers quite some insights for developers new to the iPhone scene. You will be amazed on how much you can learn from the authors of the book. And lots of code samples throughout the book, you won't be disappointed.

Chapter 1 - Great introduction to the particle system, the very basic element for many types of games.
Chapter 2 - Interesting coverage on how to build a networked app/game, with the help of Google's free App Engine service using Python.
Chapter 3 - Using Core Audio to do audio streaming. This chapter is quite hardcore for me, but I was able to follow through and learned quite a lot about how audio streaming works and some tricks as well.
Chapter 4 - This chapter is right on the money - debugging! The author showed a few different approaches when debugging your iPhone apps.
Chapter 5 - This chapter covers basic SQLite operations in your codes. Currently there's no Objective-C delegate/wrappers for SQLite operations, so everything is in C fashion. There are other frameworks for a better interface with SQLite.
Chapter 6 - If you don't like dealing with SQLite, with the introduction of iPhone SDK 3.0, you can use Core Data :) This chapter shows you how Core Data and KVC protocol works.
Chapter 7 - How to send emails from your apps w/o going to the email client. The author shows both online and offline modes, as well as a nice introduction to three20 framework.
Chapter 8 - This chapter talks about networking issues, sockets, wifi detection, power management, etc. Also some insights if you want to roll out your own networking protocol stacks.
Chapter 9 - This is my favorite chapter talking about how to design an effective and responsive user interface. NSOperation and NSOperationQueue are covered, as well as tips & tricks on how to display large amount of data w/o slowing down.
Chapter 10 - Very nice introduction to Apple's push notification service, including both setup steps and server side scripts.
Chapter 11 - Mapping and Reflection on OpenGL ES. This is a brief introduction to OpenGL ES environment mapping and reflection. I wish this chapter is longer and has more coverage in depth. But again, this is not an OpenGL ES book, the topic itself deserves a whole other book.

Overall, this book is pretty advanced in many aspects of the iPhone SDK frameworks. Coverage on SDK 3.0 frameworks are much welcomed and the competence of the authors are undeniable. Again, I highly recommend this book to any iPhone developer, no matter how seasoned you are, you will learn a thing or two from this book.

iPhone Advanced Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430224037
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Rating :

Price : $39.99

Offer Price : $13.50

Overviews

As the fourth book in our series of iPhone Projects based on the work and experiences of iPhone, this volume takes on the more advanced aspects of iPhone development. The first generation of iPhone applications has hit the App Store, and now it's time to optimize performance, streamline the user interface, and make every successful iPhone app just that much more sophisticated.

Paired with Apress's bestselling Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, you'll have everything you need to create the next great iPhone app that everyone is talking about.

• Optimize performance.
• Streamline your user interface.
• Do things with your iPhone app that other developers haven't attempted.

Along with Series Editor Dave Mark, your guides for this exploration of the next level of iPhone development, include:

• Ben “Panda” Smith, discussing particle systems using OpenGL ES
• Joachim Bondo , demonstrating his implementation of correspondence gaming in the most recent version of his chess application, Deep Green.
• Tom Harrington implementing streaming audio with Core Audio, one of many iPhone OS 3 APIs.
• Owen Goss debugging those pesky errors in your iPhone code with an eye toward achieving professional-strength results.
• Dylan Bruzenak building a data-driven application with SQLite.
• Ray Kiddy illustrating the full application development life cycle with Core Data.
• Steve Finkelstein marrying an offline eMail client to Core Data.
• Peter Honeder and Florian Pflug tackling the challenges of networked applications in WiFi environments.
• Jonathan Saggau improving interface responsiveness with some of his personal tips and tricks, including “blocks” and other esoteric techniques.
• Joe Pezzillo pushing the frontiers of APNS, the new in iPhone OS 3 Apple Push Notification Service that makes the Cloud the limit for iPhone apps.
• Noel Llopis taking mere programmers into a really advanced developmental adventure into the world of Environment Mapping with OpenGL ES.

What you'll learn

• Use wi-fi to do more than simply connect to the Internet.
• Communicate with other iPhone users in real time.
• Take advantage of all the tricks built into Cocoa Touch.
• Convert your iPhone and iPod touch apps for use in other environments.
• Convert your other mobile apps for use with iPhone and iPod touch.

Who is this book for?

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform, though this title is the natural choice after any of the other iPhone X Projects books.

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Customer Review

Too Many Mistakes to be Useful - Clifford Sharp - Longmont, CO
I DO NOT recommend this book at all for any level of iPhone developer(s).

One of the projects actually just takes an Apple code example and adds a few methods here and there. I don't have to buy a book to do that. One project adds some methods and ivar's to files that are generated files per Core Data. This is always a bad idea.

There are many mistakes in the source code in the book. The source code in the book doesn't match the downloadable source code in many places. The downloadable source code fails to build and is missing files. I found such obvious errors in the downloadable source like no semicolon at the end of some of the lines. This code was obviously never built and/or tested.

This book was very poorly and hastily put together. Don't waste your money, but more importantly, don't waste your time.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Apr 26, 2010 08:53:08

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iPhone Cool Projects

iPhone Cool Projects Review

When reading introductory books in any language, it is easy to learn the language elements and concepts, but it is hard to see how everything fits together. What is great about the cool projects series from Apress is being able to see the elements and concepts in practice with projects from professionals who are active in the field.

Each chapter is written by a different author, so every project covers a different experience and topic. These range from touch interfaces to streaming audio over the network. Some of the projects presented are based on the author's live applications that are currently available through the App Store. A wide range of the topics are covered in the book with practical examples of the concepts.

This book is definitely not an introduction to Cocoa or iPhone programming. It is more geared toward the intermediate reader who has learned the basics and needs practical, real-life examples. It can also be of use to a more experienced iPhone programmer who wants to explore some of the topics in the book without having to dig through the documentation.

I would highly recommend this book because it is easy to read and does not get bogged down with basic concepts. Code is provided on the book's site and is easy to follow the code with the explanations in the book. As a beginning iPhone programmer, I found this book to be a lot of help to work out some of the concepts I was having trouble with.

iPhone Cool Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430223573
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Rating :

Price : $39.99

Offer Price : $16.86

Availability : Usually ships in 1-2 business days

Overviews

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing field—developers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed! To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba's Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer application—a topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think “collisions”). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can't see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications.

Who is this book for?

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform

Summary of Contents

1. Wolfgang Ante - Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game
2. Mike Ash - Mike Ash’s Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
3. Gary Bennett - Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
4. Matthew “Canis” Rosenfeld - All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation
5. Benjamin Jackson - Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
6. Neil Mix - Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
7. Steven Peterson - Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite

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Customer Review

Poorly Written - Christopher Morris -
I bought this book because I wanted to see code that successful iPhone developers had written. I guess I was looking for "best practices" sort of information and I was hoping that I might get insight on how to tackle some problems I have run into when developing my own applications.

Book Flow

The biggest disappointment in this book is that developers wrote it (I am assuming). The book lacks the continuity you would normally find when one or two people collaborate on an entire book. When a different person writes each chapter, you get seven different styles in this book. I found a couple of the chapters very well written, but the rest I found to be, well, written by developers. I'm not saying that developers are inherently bad at writing, but it takes a certain something to relay information to other developers effectively. Most of the writers of this book just do not have it.

Code Samples

I got very frustrated reading chapters with code snippets from applications the various authors had written. If a working application had been available to provide context to the snippets, then I would have been less frustrated. For example, in Chapter 5, the first 12 pages of the chapter provide code snippets with very brief explanations of what the code is supposed to do. No working example is provided for context. I couldn't even play with the code to see what was going on. It was almost like I was expected just to know the context because I was on the team that wrote the application. The last 10 pages actually create a working sample. I would have rather spent the entire chapter creating the application with better explanations of each step and theory behind the code.

Proofreading

I wish I had a dollar for all the typos I've seen in this book. Again, in chapter 5, page 118 there is a screen shot of the application the author wrote. The caption says it's a screen shot of the application that you will be writing at the end of the chapter. Sloppy.

Conclusion

I feel like I did get some useful information from this book. Was it worth the frustration of reading poorly written text, no context for code snippets, and numerous errors? Not in my opinion.

Looks good on paper, but the devil's in the details - David Ruedger -
I bought this after seeing the high reviews from others on this site. Unfortunately, the content doesn't quite live up to the hype for me. I got this in particular wanting more details about threading having come from the Windows world where I have implemented very robust networking applications that require UI responsiveness while results are cached in the background. I was hoping this book would shed some light on how to go about doing this in the iPhone paradigm, but the example is so rudimentary that it almost isn't even worth putting into the book. Plus, the instructions for building the app are incorrect and contain glaring omissions as well as references to code objects that don't even exist. What's worse is the code itself as listed in the book doesn't even run when built! It causes an unhandled exception due to objects created in the header file not being instantiated or initialized in the implementation file. And no where in the chapter does it say you must download the source code for the example. It walks you through it as if it has been checked and is guaranteed to work as printed. Once you download the source code, it becomes apparent how rushed or poorly thought through this portion of the book was. Whole sections of the header and implementation files are glaringly omitted from the book. Did Bennett even bother proofreading this part of the book, and if so, where were the editors in this process? It's shameful for a book that is marketed as a technical tome to increase a developer's proficiency on the platform.

I'll admit that I haven't delved into other parts of the book in great detail, but the game portion did look pretty interesting at first glance. However, the hands on experience I had with the threading chapter left a very bad first impression and does not leave me all too optimistic on either the usefulness or accuracy of the additional content in the book.

*** Product Information and Prices Stored: Apr 19, 2010 05:41:10

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