iOS 5 Programming Pushing the Limits: Developing Extraordinary Mobile Apps

Monday, March 19, 2012

Product Details

Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Wiley; 2 edition (December 20, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1119961327
ISBN-13: 978-1119961321
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)

By : Rob Napier (Author), Mugunth Kumar
Price : $27.38
You Save : $17.61 (39%)

Customer Reviews

Don't buy this book if you're just learning iOS -- it's written with an assumption that you know how to write a complete program on your own. For example, the author will often write things like, "After that, it's just like using a normal xib file," or assume you know the difference between a view's frame and bounds. Another example -- the section on storyboards assumes you know how to deal with iOS 4 transitions. These might be pretty basic things, but it would be frustrating for someone who isn't at that point yet.
Basically, if you've written a few applications and want to extend your abilities, you'll love this book. If you're in the target audience for this book, each section is clearly explained and contains just the right amount of information to take you to the next level. In particular, the author is very good at explaining those odd conventions that make you want to scream without over-explaining everything else. I highly recommend it.

As a long time iOS programmer, I thought I knew a thing or two about the platform, but my day job has been demanding for the last year or so and I'd fallen behind on new developments and techniques, and some not so new. And along comes this wonderful book to remind me of all the little things I could be doing to make my Objective-C do more with less code or do things I didn't know it could do.
This book is up to date as of the beginning of 2012. For example it covers such iOS 5 APIs as Storyboards, iCloud integration, and Automatic Reference counting, along with such still cutting edge technologies as Blocks and Grand Central Dispatch, and older tech that still frustrates such as the use of Core Animation and Key Value Observing. Through it all, I don't think I went 5 pages without encountering an idea, concept or fact new to me. I was also happy at the high level walkthrough of Xcode 4, as I'm still transitioning from 3.2 with some unhappiness. Topics were seemingly picked for their relevance to the working coder so plenty of dealing with web servers and optimizing table performance.
One bit of elegance stood out for me, that I could create an NSDictionary from a JSON snippet and turn around and call setValuesForKeysWithDictionary: on my object and bam it would configure all its properties (or perhaps most of them with a few unfortunately named properties needing a little help). Maybe this is obvious. Maybe everyone else in the world does this, but to me, that encapsulates the power of Objective-C combined with pervasive use of key value coding.
Many parts of the book will be useful to Mac programmers as well. For example, the chapter on Core Text, or the chapter on the inner workings of the Objective-C runtime.
The one chapter for which I didn't get the point was about working offline, as the author's didn't quite make their case as to why I would choose NSKeyArchiver over Core Data, but even this weakest chapter was better than you'd find in most programming books.
If you are a pro iOS coder or aspire to be. buy this book and read it as fast as you can.