What do you think?
Rate this book
The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook: Core Concepts and Essential Recipes for iOS Programmers
This book delivers all the information developers need to quickly start building successful iOS apps for Apple's market-leading mobile devices: iPhone and iPod touch. Best-selling author and iPhone development guru Erica Sadun has thoroughly revised and focused her market-leading book to cover the brand-new iOS 5. The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook is packed with ready-made solutions for the challenges every iOS developer faces - eliminating trial-and-error and helping developers build reliable apps from the very beginning. Sadun teaches each new concept and technique through robust, cookbook code that is easy to reuse and extend. This isn't just cut-and-paste: using her examples, Sadun fully explains both the how and why of effective iOS development.Topics covered in The iOS 5 Developer's Cookbook include: Designing effective interfaces Leveraging Apple's frameworks Working with view controllers, split views, animations, and images Using gestures and touches Building and using controls, popovers, alerts, and other features New iOS developers will especially appreciate Sadun's example-rich introductions to Objective-C, the Xcode 4 integrated development environment, and Interface Builder.
790 pages, Paperback
First published November 14, 2011
8 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 12, 2012
I suppose I shouldn't fault this book: its title says it's a cook-book, and that's what it is. After a rather long, often sententious, and (in my opinion) wrong-headed, introduction to programming in Objective C (I say wrong-headed because for no obvious reason the author seems to believe that instead of embracing the final arrival of automatic memory management, developers should carry on with the nightmarish mess that was memory management pre-ARC), you get an extended 'press this button, click that selector' introduction to interface-builder, and then a whole load of recipes. Now the recipes are not in themselves bad or useless. Except for a few points.
First, no effort is made to get you to explore beyond what happens in the recipe, so the author doesn't explain why she's done what she has, she doesn't discuss alternatives, or tell you what the classes she's using are capable of. So you end up knowing how to do what she showed you, but not knowing how to change it to be what you want. So, there's a whole chapter about ViewControllers, but the precise relationship between a NavigationController, a ViewController and a View are never properly explained. Second, and more important, she doesn't show the context in which her recipes sit. For example, one recipe involves building a stack of views on an iPhone screen, with forward and backward buttons. The code shows us how to get from window n to window n+1 and back again. But - it doesn't show us how the application gets to window 1 in the first place. With any large-scale graphical framework, be it Cocoa or X-Windows, getting the whole thing up and running is often the hardest part. Now, I believe you can download the complete code for the recipes, but not explaining how to initialise code is inexcusable.
Stepping back, the book makes no real effort to instill understanding. As I said, there is a complex relationship between Apps, Navigation Controllers, View Controllers and Views, but that is never made explicit. And the chapter on Core Data is simply woeful: instead of trying to explain how it does object-relational mapping, it simply tells you how to click on XCode to make pictures. This is symptomatic of the basic problem with the book: it does not teach you how to use Cocoa to build an App for iOS5: it shows you some neat tricks that you could use if you already knew what you were doing. As such, this will remain on my book-shelf (unlike the woefully awful book from O'Reilly), but it certainly won't be my first reference.
First, no effort is made to get you to explore beyond what happens in the recipe, so the author doesn't explain why she's done what she has, she doesn't discuss alternatives, or tell you what the classes she's using are capable of. So you end up knowing how to do what she showed you, but not knowing how to change it to be what you want. So, there's a whole chapter about ViewControllers, but the precise relationship between a NavigationController, a ViewController and a View are never properly explained. Second, and more important, she doesn't show the context in which her recipes sit. For example, one recipe involves building a stack of views on an iPhone screen, with forward and backward buttons. The code shows us how to get from window n to window n+1 and back again. But - it doesn't show us how the application gets to window 1 in the first place. With any large-scale graphical framework, be it Cocoa or X-Windows, getting the whole thing up and running is often the hardest part. Now, I believe you can download the complete code for the recipes, but not explaining how to initialise code is inexcusable.
Stepping back, the book makes no real effort to instill understanding. As I said, there is a complex relationship between Apps, Navigation Controllers, View Controllers and Views, but that is never made explicit. And the chapter on Core Data is simply woeful: instead of trying to explain how it does object-relational mapping, it simply tells you how to click on XCode to make pictures. This is symptomatic of the basic problem with the book: it does not teach you how to use Cocoa to build an App for iOS5: it shows you some neat tricks that you could use if you already knew what you were doing. As such, this will remain on my book-shelf (unlike the woefully awful book from O'Reilly), but it certainly won't be my first reference.
September 29, 2012
4.5 This is one of those times when I dearly wish there were 1/2-star ratings - it's not perfect, but is very likely as close as anything with this breadth and reasonable depth will ever be. This will not hold your hand and walk you through design and construction of a complete application; it offers precisely what the title spells out. About 1100 pages worth (the print edition is only the first 15 chapters - there are 9 more only in electronic format, available for a few dollars as a supplement) of content, covering probably about 80% of what I might have hoped for. If you want a tutorial, or an exploration of Cocoa frameworks or Core Data, look elsewhere.
She is not hesitant to point out Apple's shortcomings and how to approach these, nor to point you cheerfully to other authors regardless of publisher, as well as other resources. ARC is a wonderful advance, but chances are you'll need to bridge the two worlds, so she immediately addresses that. She wisely does not attempt to be all-encompassing, pointing out time and again that there are publishing constraints and cannot do justice to some topics - her goal is to introduce concepts, show you the path forward, point out common pitfalls and share useful techniques. In this she succeeds admirably. If you haven't been inspired by possibilities, if your creative juices aren't flowing as you make your way through this tome, well... you're simply doing it wrong.
She is not hesitant to point out Apple's shortcomings and how to approach these, nor to point you cheerfully to other authors regardless of publisher, as well as other resources. ARC is a wonderful advance, but chances are you'll need to bridge the two worlds, so she immediately addresses that. She wisely does not attempt to be all-encompassing, pointing out time and again that there are publishing constraints and cannot do justice to some topics - her goal is to introduce concepts, show you the path forward, point out common pitfalls and share useful techniques. In this she succeeds admirably. If you haven't been inspired by possibilities, if your creative juices aren't flowing as you make your way through this tome, well... you're simply doing it wrong.
December 4, 2012
This book was informative in obtaining a broad overview of the various frameworks and libraries that the iOS SDK provides. While some of the examples used practices I find suspect, the modal alert for example, and other examples seem contrived, such as the recipe to write text onto paths, this may simply be the nature of a recipe-style book.
Thus take with a grain of salt, and a mindfulness that prohibits wholesale copying of the code, this book is an informative and a comprehensive view of the iOS SDK.
February 20, 2012
Really great book and a good complement to the Big Nerd Ranch book on iOS Programming.
This book does assume that you are familiar with at least C programming and Objective-C, and while it does have a quick overview of Xcode, I recommend the Big Nerd Ranch books, on Objective-C and iOS programming before this one. See my reviews of those books for more detail.
This book does assume that you are familiar with at least C programming and Objective-C, and while it does have a quick overview of Xcode, I recommend the Big Nerd Ranch books, on Objective-C and iOS programming before this one. See my reviews of those books for more detail.
July 3, 2014
Chapters bookstore. Dense. Covers the wrong topics.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.