Core Animation for Mac OS X and the iPhone by Bill Dudney

Publisher: The Pragmatic Programmers
RRP: $34.95 (Available in PDF for $22)

Table of Contents

Buy From Amazon
Buy Direct From Publisher

Review By James Sugrue

Introduction
As a relatively recent Switcher, the one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the quality of Mac applications. The majority of Mac applications are not only functional but offer a great user experience. As Mac developers we must think about the User Experience as much as the actual functionality of the application. Adding some nice transition animations or sliding a view just adds to the application.

To quote from the book, “Core Animation is not going to relieve us of the aesthetic difficulty of making a beautiful user interface, but it does a great job of relieving us of the technical tedium” Couldn’t have put it better myself.

The Review
As I said in the opening paragraph, I am fairly new to Cocoa programming, and haven’t had anything to do with Core Animation until opening the book. The book, I think, is aimed at developers with Cocoa experience, but who are completely new to Core Animation concepts and practice. The chapters start with the basics such as moving an image using the default Cocoa Animation Animator proxy and move through the different types of Animation –such as Keyframe Animations where you have a start and end point, na animation period and CA fills in the rest.

From there the book explains Animation timing, and Cocoa Layers and then on to the meat which is full blown Core Animation. The steps progress logically and in bite sized pieces from one another. The minor critiscm I do have is that compared to other development books, the code examples are quite light. There is a lot of theory to get through in the first part of the book to lay the foundation for the heavier Core Animation chapters to follow, so this is to be expected.

The chapters on Core Animation introduce concepts such as 3D space and 3D transformations that can be heavy going in places, but Dudney does a good job of explaining the technical content in such a way that is sticks.

The last chapter of the book discusses Core Animation on the iPhone. I guess if you have gotten this far then you can apply your knowledge to Cocoa-Touch, but the chapter feels more like an afterword or after thought.

Conclusion
Overall though, I think this book excellent at explaining the concepts and taking you from novice to understanding and applying Core Animation techniques in your next application.  If you are new to Cocoa and the Mac then I would not recommend this be the first book you read, but  for anyone who is serious about Cocoa development, then this book should be on your bookshelf.

About James Sugrue
I have been developing for about 15 years on a number of platforms but mainly Windows or Smart devices. I saw the light in 2006 and have been trying to move all my coding to Cocoa since. Still doing C# by day in the banking industry, but by night creating iPhone applications at http://www.retainrelease.com which include Hundred Pushups, Two Hundred Situps, Twenty Chinups and the Sleepmaker series. I’m also available for any freelance work and as the NZ$ is ridiculously low, can offer great bang for your buck (or Pound or Euro) . I live in New Zealand with my Wife and two young children. When I’m not coding I play a bit of football, do a bit of running and cycling and as most other Kiwi males, offer armchair advice on the All Blacks!