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iPhone 4 Development – Book Review

admin — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 20:01:47 +0000

Hey

Every so often I have a really cool book to review, today’s book is Beginning iPhone 4 Development for iOS 4 (iOS 5 version here) by apress. Its a comprehensive guide and manual for developing your very own iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch apps, all for $20. Its designed as an in depth look at the iOS SDK, and will hopefully teach you all the basics and the routes needed to begin developing your very own apps. I personally like to develop things for the Mac, I have previously reviewed Learn Mac Programming With Cocca before on this site which taught me how to work in the Mac environment, this book isn’t to big of a leap into the world of iOS devices.

Over the last couple of months I have been working through this book, it is actually the second in the series by apress for iPhone development. The first being iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners (or the iOS 5 version), designed at the absolute beginner to any programming language. iPhone 4 Development assumes you know a little bit about programming. However, if you are completely new to the coding world, I reckon you will soon be able to pick it up.

Overview

Lets begin by what is included in the book. I have listed the table of contents below.

Welcome to the Jungle
Appeasing the Tiki Gods
Handling Basic Interaction
More User Interface Fun
Autorotation and Autosizing
Multiview Applications
Tab Bars and Pickers
Introduction to Table Views
Navigation Controllers and Table Views
iPad Considerations
Application Settings and User Defaults
Basic Data Persistence
Grand Central Dispatch, Background Processing, and You
Drawing with Quartz and OpenGL
Taps, Touches, and Gestures
Where Am I? Finding Your Way with Core Location
Whee! Gyro and Accelerometer!
iPhone Camera and Photo Library
Application Localization
Where to Next?

The book starts out by introducing you to the iOS world. Since you are developing for mobile devices, the code and the development will be different. You are working with a phone, not a fully fledged Mac, therefore the interface and interaction with the app you will be creating will be different. Once you have breezed through the first chapter, you are ready to jump into the nitty gritty of actually coding. Developing apps on the Mac uses Xcode, therefore a good portion of the second chapter explains what Xcode is and the main features you will be using. I particularly like the tips section of this chapter as it explains some of the other features of development that you will be using.

Having read chapter one and two, chapter three will being to teach and show you how to actually code. You will develop a slightly more complex app than one mentioned in chapter two. One with two buttons on the side of the screen which change the labels text when clicked. Nothing amazing, but very useful in learning how the code base runs on an iPhone. The first half of the chapter deals with the code, with the second using the interface builder to develop the interaction by the user. There is a lot of code and some writing involved, but the books layout and clarity (along with Xcode intuitive interface) don’t make this task to difficult. The very last section of the chapter allows you to try the app out. Xcode has an iPhone simulator, so you can develop an app without a iPhone present (or iPad or iPod Touch for that matter).

Extending The Learning

At this point you will have learnt a couple of commands and had a basic look at the interface, if you enjoy this book as much as I did you will be having a wail of a time. Chapter four extends the interface aspect of iPhone development with sliders, segmented buttons and switches. Typical iPhone interface controls you see in every app (the standardisation of Xcode and iPhone development are the cause of this). Similar to previous chapters, you develop the code and then build the interface. The clear ‘code’ text along with the tips make understanding why you are doing something useful and actually writing the code simple.

By the end of chapter four I had an appreciation of how complex you can make an app. A lot of work is needed to get something simple up and running. At this point you have written a large amount of code and used the interface builder extensively.

Going Further

I could at this point begin to explain every chapter in detail, how ever that would become a boring read. To summarise the next 15 chapters (covering all 630+ pages) take you into the finer aspects of apps on the iOS device. For example, chapter five takes into account the rotation function of your phone and the resulting applications view, chapter fifteen introduces and expands on gestures and multi touch swipes, chapter seventeen discusses the gyro and accelerometer for expanding user functionality and continuing chapters talk about the camera and core location.

The book also explains the more in depth aspects of development, for example chapter 13 introduces and discusses background processing through the use of Grand Central Dispatch, where your app can do more than more thing at once. This is very useful if you plan on have some complexity in your app, it is difficult to use your app if you have to wait for one task to finish before a second can commence. Its a difficult chapter to read, however a very useful one. Other similar chapters explain other complex topics which you need to understand in order to produce a good app.

Conclusion

Overall it is a very well written book. Other than the odd scratching the head moment, usually caused by myself typing something wrong or not thinking right the book delivers what it promises. It does get technical very quick, so if you have read of developed something before using objective-C, it is a great bonus. If you haven’t the one previous in the series is probably a very good read. I can’t say much more about this book. I found it great, and over the coming months I am going to be reading more and developing my little app.

However, it is not the latest version of this book and Xcode and the iOS world have moved forward. It has taken me a long time to read this book. Therefore if you want the latest addition I recommend iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners, iOS 5 Edition. Its probably very similar, and written in a similar style to the version I have been using.

Therefore if you want to start iPhone development for $20 you really can’t go wrong. The apress series of books mean there is plenty of topics for you to read. For example there is More iOS 5 Development which builds upon this book and iOS 5 Games Development for something more specific. There is a lot of books in this series so you can be developing apps for years to come.

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Ten Must Have Mac Books To Read

admin — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:11:47 +0000

Hey

I like reading books, especially relating to topics I love. Thankfully the Macintosh community have some of the best library of books to read. This post is going to summarise some of my favourite and well received books relating to the Mac community. This is by no means a complete list and I encourage you to post your favourite Mac books using the comment section below. If we are ready lets begin.

1) Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual

The first book on the list is Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual. The missing manual series is one of my favourite. They are comprehensive and usually well written. I’m going to start the list with a “Switching to” book as I think they are one of the best books to use when you first have a Mac. I bought one a long time ago and it helped me immensely when I first started out. If you are new to the Mac platform, or you know someone who has just got there first Mac, I wholehearted recommend Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual.

2) Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual

The next book is another missing manual, Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual to be specific, the first being the switching to. This book, I think, is a more general book. Unlike the switching to series this book does away with the comparisons to Windows and focuses on how to get the most out of your Mac. It is a great general introduction to the Mac platform and introduces new and existing users on how to use there Mac. If you want a general reference guide this is the way to go.

3) Mac OS X Unix Toolbox

Moving on from the basic guides we get to something more technical. The Mac OS X Unix Toolbox. It is a well written book introducing and showing you how to use Terminal and it commands. If you have looked through MacTricksAndTips for a couple of minutes you will notice the tricks and tip relating to Terminal. This book takes a view on introducing you to Terminal and some of the more general commands and gets you up to speed on how to use Terminal and the Unix background effectively. If you want to go further with your Mac, this is the book for it.

4) Automator for Mac OS X

Continuing on the technical route, the next book you should read is Automator for Mac OS X: Visual QuickStart Guide. Automator is one of the best tools included with your Mac and it is worth learning how to use it. Every week I end up building an Automator routine to run and learning some tricks of the trade (so to speak) is well worth the time and effort. Even a basic knowledge of how Automator works is a great way to speed up your day.

5) AppleScript: The Definitive Guide

Automator and Applescript go hand in hand. Applescript is the more technical and code orientated version of Automator. Therefore if you want to take your Automator routines to the next level and do some really cool stuff Applescript is the ay to go. AppleScript: The Definitive Guide shows you the definitive (clues in the title) way to learn and use AppleScript. In the end you should be able to to do some really cool stuff to impress your friends.

6) Beginning Xcode (Programmer to Programmer)

As we continue on our route on learning more about our Mac I feel it is time to introduce Beginning Xcode (Programmer to Programmer). Its a beginners guide on how to use XCode to build your own applications. Although the book isn’t for everyone, if you want to make your own apps this guide is the perfect place to start. It is a bit technical however you will learn a lot and its just a stepping stone for you in making the next big Mac app. I have, in the past, reviewed Learn Mac Programming with Cocoa which is similar to Beginning Xcode.

7) iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners

On a similar vein to number six, iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners is dedicated to showing your the basics on how to write your own apps for the iPhone of iPad. Although everyone may not read this book, if you want to mess around with writing your own app, this book is the perfect place to start.

8) Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible

Everyone needs a reference book of some sort to refer to when they are stuck. Instead of searching Google for hours, Mac OS X Snow Leopard Bible is a far better alternative. It goes from the basics all the way up to complicated topics such as OpenGL and Grand Dispatch.

9) Portable Genius Series

Number nine is not a specific book per se, but a series of books. The Portable Genius Series is a great selection of small books to refer to when you get stuck or need a little helping hand. Previously I have reviewed Switching To A Mac and I found it really useful and well written. There is plenty of books in the series at good prices so find the topic you are interested in and check it out.

10) Mac OS X Leopard: Beyond the Manual

The last book takes the basic introductions of the “Switching to” and Missing Manual series and goes that little extra step. The Mac OS X Leopard: Beyond the Manual book is more technical a bit more advance and goes into topics a little bit more.

Honourable Mention: The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs

This last book, to complete the list, is The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs. Its not really a Mac book at all. However, I came across it while compiling this post and it is really good and useful. Most of us will do presentations at some point and a good presentation is always fun to listen to. I have plenty of presentations to do at University and a fantastic presentation is always well received. So if you do want to give a presentation that edge check out this book.

Conclusion

Hopefully you enjoyed this list and I have brought to your attention a couple of interesting and new books for you to read. You don’t have to read them all however I would certainly recommend you try out at least one to broaden your knowledge of your Mac.

If you have any books your would like to see mentioned please leave a comment below.

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Learn Mac Programming with Cocoa- Book Review

admin — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:20:51 +0000

Evening,

For a slight change I am going to review Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa by Pragmatic Bookshelf. Over the last couple of weeks I have been reading through this book, trying out the methods and tutorials, as a result I now know a bit about programming for the Mac. The book is designed to teach you the basics about programming for the Mac and show you pointers to get yourself start on what is a long journey on learn how to program. Within this post i’ll go over the main topics of the book, explain the pro’s and con’s and hopefully give you a good idea about the book itself.

If you have ever wanted to learn how to program it can be a daunting task. The code, the features of a program, XCode isn’t an easy program to learn by itself, as a result it can really hard to get into a programming language. This is where a book such as Beginning Mac Programming comes in. It’s set at people who have no programming experience at-all, so it teaches the basics on programming and puts in a context of using it on a Mac, I also think it is a good book for any one who wants to move into Objective-C and writing for the Mac platform. The book itself is around 400 pages when you take into account the appendices (352 pages is the official count), and each section is designed to help you learn and develop your skills.

The Breakdown

No book would be complete without a simple step by step guide, or a way to “walk” through the book. This book is no different and is split into 14 main chapters. The contents are as follows and cover everything from a basic introduction all the way to loops and complex computer functions.

Your First Application
All About Objects
Object Messaging
Variables and Memory
Passing Information Around
Objects and Memory Management
Collecting Information
Branching Out
Looping and Enumerating
Objects, Encapsulation, and MVC
All About Views
Mac OS X and Cocoa Mechanisms
Where to Go from here
Developing for the iPhone
Installing Xcode

The book breaks down learning Cocoa in simple steps, each developing on the previous chapters. The first chapter ” Your First Application”, introduces you to XCode and how an applications on a Mac works. It goes over XCode’s interface and shows you some of the main points of “main.m”. One of the files needed for a Mac app to work. Later in the chapter it develops basic Cocoa rules, which are used to display the interface you see. Near the end of the first chapter it will go into explaining how to build your first app. Through out the book you will be developing and extending your skills on an app called “TextApp”. It has no real function other than to explain and show you how things work on the Mac platform. By the end of the chapter you will have something that looks like the image below.

Not bad for your first Mac program. None of this “Hello World” stuff. A proper application. Admittedly it is a bit simple with just an area to write text, however making this app allows you to learn a lot about for XCode and Interface Builder works. You will be expanding on this app as you go through the book. The book itself isn’t designed to develop a specific application, but shows you all the different methods that can be found in most basic apps.

The second chapter introduces Objects, also known as Object Orientated Programming. This is where you can write a bit of code and then reference it from various parts of your applications. It is the basis of most programming languages. Within the chapter header and method files are introduced and explained there importance (they are very important). It promptly goes on to explain how to use them, and apply them to TextApp.

The next sections about Object Messaging, Variables and Memory and Passing Information Around, shows you how XCode and Object-C works with information and basic code. Each section is significant and the book explains why you should take note. After this Objects and Memory Management explains how to write good code so you don’t end up with errors a using lots of memory (which is both a good thing).

The final chapters Collecting Information, Branching Out, Looping and Enumerating all deal with loops and If statements found in most programming languages, if you have used other programming languages the basic features of programming are found here. Basic commands and statements which all programs employ. Each chapter takes the basic TextApp (which is more evolved than the image above) and allow it to become smarter and more of what you expect for an application. One of the first things you are introduced to is If statements. Your app displays different items of text when you enter a specific number. This technique is then developed further to boolean statements, so something happens when something is True or False, finally Case statements are used to define many operations, more which can be defined with just If statements. The book goes on to introduce dialogue warning boxes and lists with those little plus and minus boxes you see everywhere at the end of the chapters you will end up with something that looks like the image below.

The image above is a lot more complicated and developed than the first screens shot. If you have been paying attention to the code and the explanation you should know exactly what is happening and how to do it yourself. Within this book all of the background code is explained to you and more importantly why you are doing it.

The final chapters go into displaying information on screen and the Quartz software. If you develop more interactive apps, I can see how information learnt in this chapter would be used in other applications. As well as this there is a dedicated chapter for learning Cocoa and Mac Mechanisms so the applications you build are good Mac applications. There is also a chapter dedicated to showing you the basics on building an iPhone app. Nifty.

Within the back of the book is some of the most important piece of information. Included is ways to find more information including a bibliography and cool websites to visit. There is also information on how to install XCode, although you could just read my post about it.

The Low Down

Hopefully you have a good understanding of what’s in this book. I didn’t want to explain every little detail otherwise there would be no point in reading the book. If you want more information you can always read the excerpts. There are two available one on Passing Information Around and a second on Object Messaging. Both excerpts give you a good idea on what the final book is about although they are a bit short.

Most of the chapters at the beginning will take you about an hour depending on how quickly you work through them. The later chapters will take longer as there is more information within them and you deal with more complex topics. I recommend you learn from an actual book rather than an eBook or PDF as it will force you to write code rather than copy and paste it as I did with the pre-release eBook. By writing the code you get a better understanding of what is happening. Code wise you do go over and change the code a lot, however each change adds more complexity and hopefully you learn something new from it.

The book itself is written in a easy to understand with lots of analogies to help you understand some of the more difficult concepts, as a new user to Cocoa and Objective-C I understood what was happening and why we were doing it. I didn’t find any bits of code that didn’t work or didn’t work as intended, this is always a bonus for a book about coding. I’ve come across many books where the code you write doesn’t work.

Throughout the book there is plenty of images and steps for what you must do. Almost every action which involves you adding something to the project has an accompanying image. The code itself is written in a different font a colour to help you see what you should be writing. Code which you change is also bold and a different colour making it easier to understand what it happening. There is also plenty of tool tip boxes and foot notes to give you more information and understanding.

By the end of the book, I understood the basics of Objective-C and Cocoa including pointers objects and other features of the language. Although I do have some previous programming experience, Objective-C is new to me and did manage to understand a great deal of it by the end of the book.

The Not So Good

There is a couple of problems with this book that I must point out. The tool tip boxes and images are always at the top of the next page. Most of the time this isn’t a problem, however there is cases where you want to look at two images (which is explained in the text) and you have to go searching for them over the next couple of pages. This sort of breaks the flow of reading, since there is still blocks of text within below the images. At certain points you end up flicking back and forth a couple of times. Fortunately this doesn’t happen very often.

Another slight problem with this book is that some of the more complex topics seems to be slightly rush or not explained in full. It could just be me reading the book to fast, but at points I do feel like I am doing something for no reason. This, again, doesn’t happen very often but there is a couple of points within the book that I feel could have a bit more thought.

Conclusion

To conclude Beginning Mac Programming: Develop with Objective-C and Cocoa is a great book to get your started with learning to program Cocoa and Objective-C. It offers all of the basics and I feel I understand enough of the language to start playing around with it myself. The book refers to some basic concepts and backs them up with facts and ways to find out information on your own. There is numerous times where the official reference guide is called. This helps a lot when you want to write your own programs.

The book itself costs $23 if you buy is from Amazon, which is a bargain considering the depth and the amount of information contained within the chapters. By the end of it you should be wanting to learn more and build your own applications. By the end of it you will probably want to learn more. Further reading includes Cocoa Programming: A Quick-Start Guide which is a follow on book written by Pragmatic. Other books by different publishers include Learn Objective–C on the Mac (Learn Series) and Learn Cocoa on the Mac both by APress Books. There is plenty of information out there.

There you have it. Any one can learn programming I don’t it is that hard. Please leave a comment below with what you think. I hope that this post gives you a good insight into the book and what it contains. I definitely recommend it.

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Book Review – Switching To A Mac

admin — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 21:02:05 +0000

Hey

I haven’t done a book review on this blog so I thought I would give one a shot. I have just received a brand new copy of Switching To A Mac, A Portable Guide published by Wiley and written by Paul McFedries. Its a great little book which I have been reading over the last couple of days. If you want to pick up a copy the best place is Amazon (UK) where you can get a copy nice and cheap.

The book is made up of 11 chapters plus the index. These are split up into “What Is The Different Between Mac And Windows”, ” Which Applications Do I Use”, ” How Do I Perform Everyday Tasks”, “How Do I Transfer E-mail etc”, “How Do I move Other Data”, “How Do I Work With Files And Folders”, “How Do I Connect Devices”, “How Do I Perform Mac Maintenance”, “How Can I Solve Mac Problems”, “How Can I Share Data Between Windows” and “How Can I Run Windows”. You can find more information in each of the chapters in this PDF file.

As mentioned each chapter focuses on a specific section. It is designed so you can find out how to do something very specific. For the new user it is very useful. Especially to people who are not that tech savvy.

Each chapter will start out relatively simple, for instance it will tell you how to update your iPod. It will then move on how to update podcasts, movies and other features linking with other applications. The chapter will then move onto different items. There is a lot of detail within each small section.

Most items will be accompanied with an image, various notes plus a detailed bullet point list. If you want to read a sample chapter check it out here. Every chapter is well written and has loads of supporting data. The entire book is really meaty weighing in at 363 pages. There is lots of supporting material such as tables of shortcuts and online resources.

Overall this book is well written. I like how it is laid out and set up. For the new user it is great. However for anyone who has used a Mac for a couple of weeks I don’t think this book is that useful. I think it is really useful for people who have received a Mac as a present or as a new purchase and has never used one before. I would also like to see more tricks and general tips, however I think that is out of the scope of the book.

If you are new to the Mac system, this book is well worth it. You can find it for the best price at Amazon. There is also a couple of other books by the publisher focusing on different topics. I assume each one is similar in nature. The books are quite small in size so you can easily put it in a bag or laptop case enabling you to take it anywhere. Its not the size of an encyclopedia so you can quickly check back to it at a later date.

Its quite hard to give a more detailed review without rambling. If you have any questions please leave a comment below.

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