iPhone SDK Programming – Developing Mobile Applications for Apple iPhone and iPod Touch by Maher Ali

This book review is by  Chris Walters

I received the UK edition of the book, so I don’t know if the US edition is the same. The book targets novice iPhone developers by including introductory Objective C concepts and advances to iPhone specific tool kits and frameworks.

The chapters are listed here:
1. The Objective-C Programming Language
2. Collections
3. Cocoa Touch
4. Building advanced mobile user interfaces
5. Core Animation and Quartz 2D
6. Model-View-Controller (MVC) designs
7. Table Views
8. File Management
9. Parsing XML documents using SAX and DOM
10. Working with Google Maps API
11. Consuming REST Web Services
12. Building advanced location-based applications
13. Developing database applications using the SQLite engine
14. Building Multimedia applications
15. Making use of the camera and video
16. Working with the accelerometer

This book is ambitious in its attempt to cover both introductory and advanced material.  The chapter on collections contains informative diagrams to help programmers visualize the data structures that are used in the text.

The introductory sections are comprehensive, but dense.  Important concepts such as protocols and key-value-coding are introduced early, but this may lead to confusion and overload the novice developer.

This book has (in my opinion) some of the worst typography I’ve ever seen for the illustration of code.  The font used for code samples is a proportional font, yet the samples are typeset as if for a fixed width font.  This makes the code samples difficult to read.

Despite the clear ambitions of the author, the coverage of the material seems to fizzle out towards the end of the book.  The advanced topics in the last few chapters could easily be expanded upon to include more information and examples.
The book also lacks any information about application best practices – at least, not in a single summarized chapter, and there is no CD provided that contains the code.  The section on Xcode and the tools is also quite weak and is limited to a few pages. Debugging, InterfaceBuilder, and Instruments are not covered at all.

In my opinion, the book could benefit from the inclusion of an introductory chapter that gives an overview of the tools and environment, and a guide to the ever important documentation that accompanies the SDK.

Finally, it would be nice to see this kind of book at least touch on the topic of publishing the application to the app store, and the practicalities of packaging, testing and distribution.

Conclusion
In summary, Maher Ali has released a comprehensive book that covers a wide variety of topics.  Hopefully, in future editions, the font and typography used to illustrate example code will be improved.  Also, as this material evolves I hope to see additional examples and information provided in the chapters covering more advanced topics, as well as better introductory material to make sure novice C programmers can come up to speed more quickly.

About Chris Walters
Chris Walters, a long time Objective C developer and course instructor who has written over a dozen iPhone applications since March 2008.