iPhone SDK: Application Development Book Review

When I first started learning to develop iPhone Apps, I went and bought a copy of Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, mainly because it was the only book available that seemed promising in January 2009....

Then, I found the iPhone SDK: Application Development book and it contains details of ALL of the user interactions that I've been trying to develop on my own.

The Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK book is great for beginners to get up to speed on the iPhone's functionality, but it lacks the basic components needed to complete the user experience that people have come to expect from most iPhone Apps. I was constantly soliciting help from other iPhone developers on Twitter for help with things like the Page Flick interaction because it wasn't written up in this book. It has lots of pictures of the iPhone sample programs running in the screen view, but this just means there is less room for explanations that could lead to something you or I can customize. This book, in my opinion, won't be enough to build a production ready program that will garner high sales in the iTunes App Store by itself...

Bottom Line: Jonathan Zdziarski's iPhone SDK book provides fully detailed instructions to intermediate XCode programmers on how to construct and embed almost all of the iPhone's notable UI features: Date/Time Pickers, Progress / Activity Indicators, Proximity Sensors, Cover Flow, and the Movie Player Controllers to name a few. The book even covers network connectivity (CFNetwork) which is quintessential for data driven applications. The prospect of using rich media components such as video and page controls means that others will be adding these features to many iPhone Apps in the future and soon demand for those items will be commonplace. There aren't a lot of pictures of sample apps running, but that's where the examples come in and you can customize the code however you want. My bet is on the book that has sections dedicated to user experiences that most iPhone users will pay money to download. Plus, most software companies won't hesitate to pay top dollar for people who can actually build Cover Flow into their software either...

Real: iPhone mastery, charging high hourly rates

Imagined: Reasons not to design / program for the iPhone