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Closed 11 years ago.
What the best books available right now on Mac and iPhone development ?
Thanks
Michael
These two books were good:
iPhone SDK Application
Development
iPhone In Action
The Apple online docs are actually pretty good too:
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/
I'd stay away from this one, I didn't think it was very good:
Programming in Objective C
You might want to consider some of these: http://cocoaheads.byu.edu/resources/book
In this order:
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X (The Bible)
Beginning iPhone Development (Long-winded but great for beginners)
iPhone SDK Development (Starts nicely, but gets a little too deep too fast. Still in beta)
Programming in Objective-C (Only down so far because I couldn't get through the first few chapters. Recommended by many, good for total programming beginners)
iPhone Cookbook (Full of mistakes, but good for learning stuff closer to the code)
iPhone in Action (I didn't learn anything from this book. Might be good for programming for Mobile Safari)
Learning Cocoa with Objective-C (Avoid)
This is mainly an iPhone list, but several are more general books.
The iPhone SDK Development looks very nice. I did not read it, but read a lot promising about it on the blog of one of the authors, Chris Adamson. The blog itself is very good reading for everybody interested in iPhone sound programming.
Related
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Closed 10 years ago.
I'm an experienced iOS developer, and I understand the basic differences between iOS and OSX development in theory, but have not written a single app for OSX. Next week, I plan to begin my first OSX app. This weekend, I have a long road trip... so I'm hoping someone can recommend a good book for learning OSX/Cocoa development, considering my existing knowledge (eg, I'd really rather not putz around with "Here's a NSString!" or other such Hello-world-esque approaches for newbies to Objective C).
Thanks!
I would be inclined to pick up Beginning Lion OSX Apps Development (a book from Apress because I had a good experience with them for iOS). The reviews on Amazon aren't the greatest but the worst reviews have complaints about the book's poor index. Someone who had iOS development experience but wanted to switch over to mac (someone like you) gave it a 4-star rating.
In all honesty though, I would opt for guides and Apple documentation. If you are going to have access to an iPad on your road trip, I would recommend you download some of Apple's programming guides to iBooks and read them during your trip. If you want examples step-by-step however, and need help overcoming a learning curve, I find Apress books to be solid.
Hope that helps!
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Closed 10 years ago.
I have started learning Objective C with no prior programming experience from the 'Become an X-Coder' eBook (http://download.cocoalab.com.s3.amazonaws.com/BecomeAnXcoder.pdf). My question is, if I want to be doing iPhone development, am I going in the right direction? Am I learning the wrong language, or should I be learning Cocoa Touch? As I said, I have no prior experience, and just need someone to point me in the right direction. Apoligies if I have put this in the wrong place. Thanks very much for your time.
The short answer is that Cocoa Touch is Objective-C. And now for the long answer...
Objective-C is the essence of Cocoa Touch, which refers to the frameworks which are built by Apple for iOS development. So basically, if you are learning Objective-C, you are learning part of Cocoa Touch. Cocoa touch refers specifically to the code libraries and frameworks written for the iPhone and iPad.
If you are starting out, you may want to learn C and then Objective-C. However, it's totally up to you. It may be helpful to know C, but not required.
If you decide to go with Objective-C as a first language, I recommend getting some books on the Objective-C language as well as some books on iOS development. I have read Head First iPhone Development (O'Reilly)Amazon | Google and Sams Teach Yourself iPhone Development in 24 hours (Amazon). Someone recommended looking into a publisher called Apress, but I haven't yet. There are also some great blogs to look at once you you get started. Matt Gallagher's Cocoa with Love is not a beginners blog, but it has some nice information there.
Finally, feel free to ask specific questions here on Stackoverflow and don't forget to use Google.
Good luck!
Personally, I started with Beginning iPhone Development by Jeff LaMarche. I liked the pace of the book and there were great relevant notes throughout the text as you went through sample projects.
After I felt a bit more comfortable with the language/platform, I dove into the three20 project. There's something super satisfying about being able to load up complex UI components, which three20 let's you do fairly easily. Plus, I found it a great way to find patterns on writing Objective-C.
Finally, I'd subscribe to a few Objective-C/iPhone blogs. Here are some that I read:
Able Pear: http://blog.ablepear.com/
Cocoanetics: http://www.cocoanetics.com/blog/
iPhone Programming Tutorial: http://icodeblog.com/
iDev Recipes: http://idevrecipes.com/ (really great idea)
Marco: http://www.marco.org/
Ole Begemann: http://oleb.net/
Ray Wenderlich: http://www.raywenderlich.com/
Jeff LaMarche: http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/
Wish you the best of luck!
Objective-C is the place to start. I would suggest Programming in Objective-C by Kochan and then move to iPhone Programming The Big Nerd Ranch Guide by Conway and Hillegass. As mentioned by others, I wouldn't start with C... Go Objective-C then a focus on iOS.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I want to learn how to use core-animation for the iPhone in a more serious manner; instead of just ripping other people's code to move a box a few pixels, I want to be able to write that code myself, and engage in translation, transformation, and other things with an understanding of the code I'm using to achieve it.
Unfortunately, the online documentation is, at best, rather dense. And while I have a good book for general iPhone programming, coreAnimation is a very large, complex area and it doesn't cover it in any real depth. Are there any good books that cover the subject?
Try Bill Dudney's Core Animation for Mac OSX and iPhone. The book does a fine job of walking through a lot of CA -- not all of which is available in the iPhone (yet?)
See also #neror's CA git project for good examples. #neror updates the project frequently and is a solid learning resource.
I have personally read "Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development". This is a colorful book and quite easy to follow. This book assumes that you have some iPhone programming knowledge, so you will also need your general iPhone programming book. This book covers topics such as basic animation, path, what can be animated. The author would present you some code fragments, illustrating their ideas.
I would like to give you another suggestion.
You are asking for a good reference book about Core Animation. As mentioned above, I recommend "Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development". However, in my experience, the book and other books on Core Animation aren't sufficient. None of the CA book is very well-written, I would rate them about 6 to 7 out of 10. Your best bet is learn from a concrete open source project. I recommend you GeekGameBoard from Apple. GeekGameBoard has two versions, the Apple version is written for MacOSX. There is a modified version for iPhone, check http://jens.mooseyard.com/2008/03/geekgameboard-getting-closer-to-iphone-ready/. Personally, I studied the source while refreshing my understanding from the book.
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Closed 9 years ago.
Am currently reading Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Hillegass just to get up to speed on Objective-C and the Development tools. What would be the next best step ?
Instructor led course ?
Online training?
Specific books ?
I can't ever learn a new development platform without a programming project.
I would pick a simple project that will touch on a bunch of different design and interface elements - and go to it...
-t
My recommended approach, especially with iPhone development, is 'learning by doing'.
I'd say you should get your hands dirty with a simple app, like "Hello World".
Next step would be to improve on it, making a simple flashlight app (display a image). You'd then improve on it by adding some dynamic text, etc.
Recommended resources:
http://appsamuck.com/ - really simple apps you can code in less than an hour, explained in detail
iPhone Development books: "iPhone Developer's Cookbook" and "Beginning iPhone 3 Development" (get them on Amazon)
CS193P is an excellent resource with all the lectures and homeworks.
Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK is a nice book.
I would pay a cheap freelancer.com to help me out via a remote desktop method. There are out there people who are experienced and for some money they will teach you.
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Closed 10 years ago.
What is the best "how to" site to learn how to program for iPhone?
The iPhone Developer Connection by Apple themselves. On the site you will find.
Reference Documents outlining the
various technologies.
Tutorials and Getting Started Guides for each type
of thing to do with the iPhone
Sample
Code that shows off the power of the
SDK
Registered developers get
access to Videos showing everything
from installing the SDK to
publishing.
Also check out this iTunes U course (iTunes link) put out by Stanford that covers a look to good tips and items on iPhone Programming
Here is the course homepage at Stanford for the above course.
There is a very nice compilation here on SO:
What are the best Cocoa-Touch/iPhone programming blogs?
Here is a well written article on "Cocoa is my girlfriend" that describes how to create a small iPhone app from scratch:
Cocoa Touch Tutorial: iPhone Application Example
A good beginners article to learn Objective-C is Scott Stevensons "Learn Objective-C".
(As it was written in the pre-iPhone era, it targets Mac software developers, but it is about basic language concepts - so it valid for both platforms)
The official iPhone developer portal has all the docs and some tutorials.
I had started out looking at this site: http://www.appsamuck.com/ Its been a while, not sure if they've updated it but about back in Feb 2009 it was very helpful to me.
In my personal experience (I wasn't initially familiar with Objective-C or even C, for that matter - my programming background was PHP Javascript, and shell scripting), I found a number of books more helpful than any website - maybe this is the answer you're looking for:
"Programming in Objective-C 2.0" by Stephen Kochan (for learning the language. Until I had this book, I continued to be confused with most of Objective-C)
"iPhone SKD" published by O'Reilly (for getting an initial grasp of how to do things)
Developer Documentation (part of Xcode - try [Alt-double clicking] on a word in Xcode)
google search
stackoverflow.com
occasionally even the framework header files (in Xcode) of the libraries you're using
Using the first three tools, I found that I could figure out most of what I needed to know. When I was at a loss after checking those sources and doing a google search, this forum has been indispensable for learning what I need.