iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners
Product Description
The iPhone is the hottest gadget of our generation, and much of its success has been fueled by the App Store, Apple’s online marketplace for iPhone applications. Over 1 billion apps have been downloaded in the 9 months the App Store has been open, ranging from the simplest games to the most complex business apps. Everyone has an idea for the next best-selling iPhone app—presumably that’s why you’re reading this now. And with the release of the iPad, this dem… More >>
iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners
-
First, to all the people giving low ratings because of a few typos – Get Over It! Any first printing of a technical book like this will have them, especially when things like the OS, SDK and dev tools are updated all the time. You have to judge the book on it’s content, not a few mistakes in printing.
As for the book, this is EXACTLY what I needed. I’ve never programmed anything before in my life, but like everyone else I want to learn iPhone programming & make a million dollars.
I started with a few other “beginning iPhone programming” books and every one of them was way too out of my league. Inevitably the first chapter would say “You need to know Objective-C first…”. So I’d grab a book on Objective-C for beginners and that would be over my head & the first chapter of those would say “You need to know C first…” So I’d grab a book on C for beginners. The one thing all of these books had in common was THEY DIDN’T EXPLAIN WHY THINGS WORK. So after reading a couple books on C, a couple on Objective-C, I was still completely lost when I started on the iPhone books.
Then I found this book. It is really the start I needed. Things are explained quite well and I was finally able to actually understand what I was doing, not just memorizing code. When learning something this foreign, it is much more helpful to have it explained thus; “This piece of code controls… and make the program do this…” or “This bit of code makes… happen because…”. Analogies are used in a terrific way so you can understand the mechanics behind it all.
To use an analogy, if you never worked on a car engine,it would be far more helpful if someone explained what a spark-plug does than just telling you you need to have them. That is the kind of teaching Dr. Lewis provides in this book. I can’t praise it and thank him enough for writing it & can’t wait for more from him.
As for the typos (and there are really only a few), I actually benefited because it gave me a bit of a crash course in debugging and figuring out how things should really work. If you get confused or lost because of them, don’t fret it, just come to the forum for this book and one of us will be happy to help out. [...]
If you are like me, “An Absolute Beginner”, then you’ll be hard pressed to find a better book to get you started. Trust me, I wasted many months trying.
Rating: 5 / 5 -
Don’t waste your money. There are so many resources online that do a better job for free. Youtube for thenewboston on objective c and Lyndadotcom for iphonedevelopment. I bought the Kindle Version for my iPad and return it after one day. Don’t count on the ratings. They are deceptive.
Rating: 1 / 5 -
Filled with typos.
Not logically structured for really learning how to build an iPhone app.
Rating: 1 / 5 -
I have yet to begin working through this book and I’d really like to “like” it but a preliminary scan turned up a few typos (which is pretty normal for a first edition) and, more to the point, the text refers to colors (that aren’t there) in the Figures. E.g., “In Figure 2-4, you probably noticed several lines of code in green …” (but there are no colored Figures in the printed text. Granted, you will see the colors on your display when you start working through the projects in the book. But still, the Amazon “LOOK INSIDE” does suggest that the book’s figures are in color. Not a show-stopper but a bit disappointing.
Rating: 3 / 5 -
That’s my major complaint with the book. It led to frustrated hours of debugging. Also inconsistencies in key commands will cause you to scratch you head. But, that said, I would still recommend the book because between the book and the videos available on Dr.Lewis’ website you will be able to work through it. More importantly, you will actually begin to understand what the code is doing to make your application and the iOS device communicate with each other.
So be forewarned about the typo’s. Go to the website listed in the book, download the example videos-between the two (books and videos) you will not only create applications, but understand how you created them. That’s a pretty valuable combination.
Rating: 4 / 5
5 Comments▼