This is a better book. It does assume you already have some background in ObjC, which may make it a little harder for people without any Cocoa experience (far and away the most common place to get ObjC experience). A short ObjC intro probably would have been useful.

I wish this book had included more discussion of basic Foundation features like Collections and Notifications, and it could really use some discussion of networking (a big issue on iPhone). Like most of the iPhone books I’ve seen, it’s focused mostly on UI issues. As such, it looks like a good book for transitioning someone who already knows Cocoa (and thus Foundation) over to Cocoa Touch. But despite being a much better book that Cookbook, I still think this is a poor first step into Cocoa. I’d certainly consider this book as a second book after Cocoa Programming.

Small side note: while I’m still a big fan of CP, it is getting dated. Version 3 doesn’t really have sufficient coverage of key Leopard features IMO. Even so, it’s the best book I’ve found on the topic.

http://www.amazon.com/Beginning-iPhone-Development-Exploring-SDK/dp/1430216263/

Tanner, is this iPhone Developer’s Cookbook? My biggest concern with that one is that it’s a “Cookbook” style book based on lots of “Recipes” to do this or that. This is often exactly the problem with how people learn Mac and iPhone development. They think that it’s just Java with a different syntax and if they learn where the brackets go, then they’ll be a Cocoa developer.

Cocoa is much more than an Objective-C syntax and a bunch of AWT-style widgets you need to learn. It’s really a set of patterns. If you know the patterns, then the widgets will be obvious. If you only know the widgets, then you will tend to be very confused about why it’s “so hard” (because you don’t know how they think about the problem), and you’ll tend to write the kind of junk code that so dominates the AppStore.

The “Dragging Views” recipe (p45) is a good example. It dives into UIView, UITouch, collections, NSUserDefaults, and calling undocumented APIs (as though this were just a normal thing to do). No foundation is provided for any of these; it’s just a bunch of code that “does it.”

I’ve seen the code that comes out of learning this way. New Cocoa developers learn UIView and UITouch first, and then spend a lot of time reinventing UIScrollView badly. UIView and UITouch are some of the last classes you should learn, once you have a solid understanding of their higher-level (and much more common) implementations like UITableView.

Have you looked at Erica Sadun’s iPhone development book? I got it for Christmas and it looks ok, but I have nothing to compare it against.