Craig Dunn recently did a review of a set of books and I've decided to add any books that weren't already listed. Summary by Craig:
I'm a big fan of Erica's from her blog and applications when the iPhone and iPod Touch first appeared and were programmable. Text is easy to read. Erica often references "when the iPhone first appeared" or "during the Beta period" - often interesting insights that add some fun to the text. There are also references to many 'undocumented' APIs - they're clearly highlighted to avoid confusion, but unfortunately they're even more difficult to use from MonoTouch than Objective-C... I felt a bit "left out" on first reading, although with btouch in MonoTouch 1.2 I'm wondering whether it might be easier to access these APIs now? (even though we're not supposed to...)
Chapter 2 - Views - does a really nice job of gradually introducing various concepts, and the Objective-C is minimal. That chapter on it's own is probably worth reading for anyone coming to iPhone programming. The rest of the first half is also fairly easy to follow (View Controllers, Basic Tables) - if the examples were in C# they might be my favorite 'introduction to iphone programming' :)
Towards the end of the book the amount of Objective-C does increase to a few multi-page listings that are more difficult to read (and probably beyond beginning C#ers) but overall the book is good value.
There is a 2nd edition due in January 2010 which will probably address my other main concern with this book: that it pre-dates the latest iPhone OS releases and hardware. Not a big deal really, but it's always nice to have info on the latest and greatest.


No comments yet, be the first one to post comment.