Product Description

This practical book offers programmers the knowledge and code they need to create cutting-edge mobile applications, using Apple's iPhone SDK. The iPhone is one of the hottest new pieces of technology: a fully functional portable Unix operating system with the most advanced hand held user interface in existence. "iPhone SDK Application Development" covers development environment for both the iPhone and iPod Touch, from windows and navigation bars to more advanced layers of the iPhone SDK, such as screen transitions, low-level graphics rendering using CoreSurface, the MultiTouch API, and digital sound and music rendering with Celestial and CoreAudio. With this book, you will: understand how the iPhone works internally, with a complete introduction to the technology; learn how different iPhone components interact with each other; use your existing Mac OS X development skills by understanding the similarities between iPhone and Mac OS X Leopard; learn about the iPhone-specific APIs, such as the user interface, to develop custom iPhone applications; and, get code examples to help you write various features of your application. With "iPhone SDK Application Development", you'll learn how to create effective iPhone applications and games with the same tools Apple uses.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30416 in Books
• Published on: 2009-03-26
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

About the Author
Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community. His work in cracking the iPhone helped lead the effort to port the first open source applications, and his book, iPhone Open Application Development, taught developers how to write applications for the popular device long before Apple introduced its own SDK. Prior to the release of iPhone Forensics, Jonathan wrote and supported an iPhone forensics manual distributed exclusively to law enforcement. Jonathan frequently consults law enforcement agencies and assists forensic examiners in their investigations. He teaches an iPhone forensics workshop in his spare time to train forensic examiners and corporate security personnel.

Jonathan is also a full-time research scientist specializing in machine learning technology to combat online fraud and spam, an effort that led him to develop networking products capable of learning how to protect customers. He is founder of the DSPAM project, a high-profile, next-generation spam filter that was acquired in 2006 by Sensory Networks, Inc. He lectures widely on the topic of spam and is a foremost researcher in the fields of machine-learning and algorithmic theory.

Jonathan's website is zdziarski.com.

Customer Reviews

A mess
How I wish I had read the reviews on amazon.com before buying this book from amazon.co.uk. The first 3 reviews there say exactly what motivated me to write this review, and have hopefully prevented others from wasting their money.

I gave up on page 34 (of 352).

This book is a jumble, with confusing language, an unforgivable lack of screenshots, and no clear path to explaining how to get an iPhone app running. It repeats itself, and does *not* explain how to do things in a task-based, step-by-step ordered fashion.

Like one of the American reviewers, I too have been programming for 25 years, so I have read a lot of technical books in my time. As I have recently encountered Mac OS X, Objective-C, Xcode and Interface Builder all at once, it's a steep learning curve. But I've been in similar situations many times before, and I know what to expect from technical books. This book is a big disappointment.

I learned more from reading a tutorial in Macworld magazine (November 2009), taken from "Beginning iPhone 3 Development", by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche, published by Apress. I will go and investigate that book instead, as the explanations in the tutorial are excellent, and the screenshots clear and helpful. And I got a working app from using that magazine instead of this book.

Regarding O'Reilly, I've just finished another of their books - "Objective-C Pocket Reference" by Andrew M. Duncan. By comparison, this was crammed with useful, easy-to-follow information, something that I have become used to when buying from O'Reilly. I will be more careful in future of buying from O'Reilly.

Zdziarski's impenetrable ramble was a waste of time and money.

good book
very good book, if you look for information about basic UI, networking, and audio APIs.
As usual, that book doesn't cover opengl ES at all.