Summary: Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK
does not provide the student a strong foundation in Cocoa, but does teach key iPhone-UI topics well. For readers with a prior background in Cocoa, it is likely a good book for transitioning to iPhone, particularly iPhone UI.
Beginning iPhone Development is a pretty good book. It assumes you already have some background in ObjC, which makes it harder for people without any Cocoa experience (the most common place to get ObjC experience). A short ObjC intro would have been useful. Like other books in this space, it doesn’t provide much background in basic Foundation features like Collections and Notifications, nor key patterns like delegation, memory management and naming. As students move beyond trivial projects, they will likely start to have trouble unless they shore up these skills elsewhere.
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Summary: If you want a real understanding of Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, this book is too recipe-based to give you that. If you really want recipes, consider Apple’s Sample Code.
I haven’t been thrilled with the first crop of iPhone development books that hit the market. This shouldn’t be surprising. It’s a new platform and, as with the first AppStore apps, the pressure to be first to market fights the authors’ desire to provide the best possible product.
I was specifically asked about iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK by Erica Sadun. My biggest concern is that it’s a cookbook based on “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 or C++ with a different syntax and if they learn where the brackets go, then they’ll be a Cocoa developer. Read more…
