iPhone Development Book Recommendation

[thunderclap]

I'm interested in learning how to develop apps for the iPhone. I found a book that's recommended called Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK and it seems that it's recommended that a basic knowledge of Objective-C. I found a book by the same publisher called Learn Obective-C on the Mac that looks good but in the description it says its an extension to Learn C on the Mac. So I guess my question is what book should I start with to learn App development? Should I started with Learn C and work my way up or can I pick up Beginning iPhone 3 Development?

 

[maverick808]

I've learned a lot of languages over the years and Objective-c was definitely the cheapest to learn. This is because Apple provide a wealth of excellent documentation themselves for free on their dev sites. There are literally hundreds of PDFs covering every aspect of obj-c and iPhone development available there for free.

So I'd suggest you start by looking into the free Apple documentation and guides before you buy a book as you could save yourself some cash. Start with the Cocoa Tutorial and then read the Objective-C language guide and see how you get on.

http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/ObjCTutorial/ObjCTutorial.pdf

 

[isaaclimdc]

I'm on the same course as you are, and I absolutely love this book: http://iphonedevbook.com/

It's called "Beginning iPhone Development" and it's simply a brilliant book that holds your hand and guides you through the complex aspects of Objective-C and the iPhone SDK. I've tried other books but I still find this one the best. The source codes for all the sample projects in the book are available for download on the site, along with a complete and very active forum of users.

I can't recommend this book enough, because personally, while I agree with the previous poster about the wealth of information provided by Apple, I just don't really like the way Apple describes things. Enjoy!

EDIT: Sorry I didn't read your post properly. You already found the updated version of the book I also recommended, which has been timely updated for the 3.0 SDK. Fantastic! I'm going to go out to get this again.

 

[thunderclap]

Thank you for the insight thus far but one question remains: do I need to learn C and Objective-C first before moving to developing iPhone apps?

 

[isaaclimdc]

You need some sort of fundamental in C and Obj-C before starting, but in my opinion, the book I recommended is great in the sense that you don't really need that much pre-knowledge. Going through and copying the example code and trying to understand what you're typing, followed by the explanations provided by the authors after the example code really helps to learn Obj-C on the fly.