The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook

“The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK,” by Erica Sadun, continues to appear in the top listings of Amazon.com’s Computer & Internet and Professional & Technical categories, according to an official report. Rather than using exhaustive documentation, The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook provides readers with the skills they need to build apps by presenting them with single-task recipes and clear, fully documented examples.

In the book, iPhone developer Erica Sadun begins by exploring the iPhone delivery platform and SDK, helping readers set up their development environment, and showing how iPhone applications are constructed. In the following chapters, Erica offers single-task recipes for the full spectrum of iPhone/iPod touch programming jobs, including:

• Utilize views and tables
• Organize interface elements
• Alert and respond to users
• Access the Address Book (people), Core Location (places), and Sensors (things)
• Connect to the Internet and Web services
• Display media content
• Create secure Keychain entries, and much more

The book also focuses on the most common issues new iPhone developers face, including laying out windows, responding to user interactions, accessing local data sources, and creating visual and audio notifications, according to the people at InformIT, the online home for Pearson’s information technology publishers. In keeping with the report in question, Erica’s book is also the top-selling electronic title through InformIT.

“This book would be a bargain at ten times its price!,” Tim Burks, iPhone software developer, TootSweet Software, said. “If you are writing iPhone software, it will save you weeks of development time. Erica has included dozens of crisp and clear examples illustrating essential iPhone development techniques and many others that show special effects going way beyond Apple’s official documentation.”

“Programming for the Macintosh operating system, and especially for the iPhone, is one of the most exciting, fastest growing, topics in technology. We meet incredibly talented developers nearly every day, who really enjoy sharing their knowledge, skills, and secrets with other developers,” Paul Boger, publisher, Pearson Technology Group, added. “Pearson is committed to helping our authors share their expertise, whether in print books, in eBooks, or in training. This is a wildly creative community, and we’re really happy to be a part of it.”

Check out The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone SDK and let us know what you think!

Tags: Book Review, development, iphone, iPhone SDK

Book – My New Mac

Mac OS is a beautiful and reliable operating system, but it can be confusing to brand new Mac owners-especially if they come from Windows. After all, Mac OS is not Windows, and that’s a good thing. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s easy for new users to penetrate this different operating system. Fortunately, with My New Mac, it won’t be long before readers are relishing those differences. Rather than focus each chapter on a specific program or feature of Mac OS (as most beginner books do), Wallace Wang takes a project-oriented approach that mirrors the sorts of things people want to do with their Mac. For example, rather than offering a tedious, step-by-step walk through of Photo Booth or iChat, Wang focuses on using Photo Booth to organize photos and post them to a website or using iChat to chat with friends. Key aspects of each program needed to perform a task are discussed and indexed for easy reference, but this is not a reference book: it’s designed to teach new users how to get the most out of their Mac by having them use it to actually do things.

Tags: Book Review, Macintosh