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iOS good iPhone dev book

M

mattjgalloway

macrumors member
Original poster
May 21, 2006
95
0
Hey,
I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a good book for iPhone development? Or maybe even a good book on objective c or cocoa development.

Any advice?
 
There aren't any published yet for the official SDK. But since the NDA is changing I expect we'll see some soon.

There's one from O'Reilly (iPhone Open Application Development) but that's talking about 1.x and jailbroken phones, I would avoid it and wait for something tailored to the full SDK.

You don't say what experience you've got already, but if your vaguely familiar with C, I found 'Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X' invaluable in learning OS X programming, the techniques of which follow over to the iPhone.
 
Hopefully you have a somewhat solid background in OO programming in Java and some C and C++ experience.

I'd highly recommend reading the first few chapeters of Steven Kochan's Programming in Objective-C. It just really helps enforce some concepts and familiarize yourself with the bizarre looking syntax.
 
mattjgalloway said:
Hey,
I was wondering if anyone could point me in the direction of a good book for iPhone development? Or maybe even a good book on objective c or cocoa development.

Any advice?
Click to expand...
Pragmatic Programmers has published a PDF beta of their book @ http://pragprog.com/ Currently only half released. I recently started reading it but haven't gotten as far as I would like. I'll post back more when I get further.
 
Hi yes sorry I didn't say what my background is. I've got a very good grounding in C++ and OO techniques - my final year project at University was written in C++ using the STL and Boost, so I definitely don't need to be taught OO techniques.

What I am finding hard is working out where everything links in with Cocoa programming and particularly on the iPhone SDK. Also I never know when to use the braces syntax to access functions / variables of a class - like [textField text] or when to use the dot syntax - like textField.text

Obviously coming from a C++ background I am thinking in the incorrect way for Objective-C, and I'd like to get out of that by reading something to help me.

I've been looking at that Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book and I may buy it...

Any more advice greatly appreciated - such as good online tutorial links (there's tonnes out there and lots are awful).

Thanks!
 
New iPhone Dev Books?

Anyone know of any books coming out for iPhone development now that apple has dropped the NDA?

[Moderator note: threads merged]
 
mattjgalloway said:
What I am finding hard is working out where everything links in with Cocoa programming and particularly on the iPhone SDK. Also I never know when to use the braces syntax to access functions / variables of a class - like [textField text] or when to use the dot syntax - like textField.text
...
I've been looking at that Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X book and I may buy it...
Click to expand...

The dot syntax for properties can be ignored initially if you like. In general, it's just a short form for accessor methods. For example:

textField.text = x;
is the same as [textField setText:x];

and

textField.text;
is the same as [textField text];

+1 for Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X. The majority of what you learn there translates very easily to the iPhone SDK.

For online resources, check out www.cocoadevcentral.com. The tutorials there are very well done IMHO. They are Mac-focused, but you can learn the iPhone specifics from the API documentation.

Kind regards
 
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