The iPhone Developer's Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone 3.0 SDK (2nd Edition)

“This book would be a bargain at ten times its price! 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.”

–Tim Burks, iPhone Software Developer, TootSweet Software

“Erica Sadun’s technical expertise lives up to the Addison-Wesley name. The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook is a comprehensive walkthrough of iPhone development that will help anyone out, from beginners to more experienced developers. Code samples and screenshots help punctuate the numerous tips and tricks in this book.”

–Jacqui Cheng, Associate Editor, Ars Technica

“We make our living writing this stuff and yet I am humbled by Erica’s command of her subject matter and the way she presents the material: pleasantly informal, then very appropriately detailed technically. This is a going to be the Petzold book for iPhone developers.”

–Daniel Pasco, Lead Developer and CEO, Black Pixel Luminance

“The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook should be the first resource for the beginning iPhone programmer, and is the best supplemental material to Apple’s own documentation.”

–Alex C. Schaefer, Lead Programmer, ApolloIM, iPhone Application Development Specialist, MeLLmo, Inc.

“Erica’s book is a truly great resource for Cocoa Touch developers. This book goes far beyond the documentation on Apple’s Web site, and she includes methods that give the developer a deeper understanding of the iPhone OS, by letting them glimpse at what’s going on behind the scenes on this incredible mobile platform.”

–John Zorko, Sr. Software Engineer, Mobile Devices

“I’ve found this book to be an invaluable resource for those times when I need to quickly grasp a new concept and walk away with a working block of code. Erica has an impressive knowledge of the iPhone platform, is a master at describing technical information, and provides a compendium of excellent code examples.”

–John Muchow, 3 Sixty Software, LLC; founder, iPhoneDeveloperTips.com

“This book is the most complete guide if you want coding for the iPhone, covering from the basics to the newest and coolest technologies. I built several applications in the past, but I still learned a huge amount from this book. It is a must-have for every iPhone developer.”

–Roberto Gamboni, Software Engineer, AT&T Interactive

“It’s rare that developer cookbooks can both provide good recipes and solid discussion of fundamental techniques, but Erica Sadun's book manages to do both very well.”

–Jeremy McNally, Developer, entp

Want to get started building applications for Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch? Already building iPhone applications and want to get better at it? This is the only book that brings together all the expert guidance–and the code–you’ll need!

Completely revised and expanded to cover the iPhone 3.0 SDK, The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook is the essential resource for developers building apps for the iPhone and iPod touch. Taking you further than before, this new edition starts out with an introduction to Objective-C 2.0 for developers who might be new to the platform. You’ll learn about Xcode and Interface Builder and learn how to set up and configure your iPhone Developer account. Additional highlights of this new edition include:

Using the iPhone SDK’s visual classes and controllers to design and customize interfaces

Using gestures, touches, and other sophisticated iPhone interface capabilities

Making the most of tables, views, view controllers, and animations

Alerting users with progress bars, audio pings, status bar updates, and other indicators

Using new Push Notifications to send alerts, whether your app is running or not

Playing audio and video with the MediaKit

Working with the Address Book, Core Location, and Sensors

Connecting to the Internet, Web services, and networks

Embedding flexible maps with MapKit and Google Mobile Maps

Building multiplayer games with GameKit

Using Core Data to build data-driven applications

Selling add-on content and services with In-App Purchasing using StoreKit

Building accessible apps with Accessibility Plus

The unique format of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook presents the code you need to create feature-rich applications that leverage the latest features of the iPhone 3.0 SDK. Over 30,000 iPhone developers turned to the first edition of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook. So should you!

Customer Reviews:

Excellent book for both new and experienced iphone programmers

By Aaron "Engineering Student" - February 7, 2010

I am new to iPhone programming and wish this book had been available a year ago when I started down this path. For people who are starting out, I would buy this book after you've worked through Mark and LaMarche's Beginning iPhone Development published by Apress. The only way to really learn a programming language/paradigm is to work through writing your own code. With a book like this, you can quickly find snippets from recipes that move you beyond the basics for your own programs.

Compared to other computer "cookbooks" (such as those published by O'Reilly, for example), this one has much more background material than recipes. Think of it as a book on iPhone programming with lots of examples. People who are more interested in recipes than learning about the iPhone SDK might be disappointed, but I can't see how. I have yet to find something I don't like about this book.

Finally I also appreciated Ms. Sadun's writing style. The book is very readable, and I... read more

Excellent resource for the deeper dive

By Jeffery Jones - December 31, 2009

Being a new iPhone developer, I had begun my study of the craft with the help of a couple Objective-C books and the experience of developing and publishing a small and simple app. I was ready to take on some bigger ideas and needed some help with discovering the best practices for the common things app developers seek to do. I made the mistake of trying to find a couple good beginner books to get a leg up. What I found was that there are dozens of somewhat remedial iPhone development resources that all offer good information that only take you just beyond "Hello World". I really wanted something meatier that was still accessible to a newer developer. I found that in this book.

Though I've only had for a couple days, I'm already thrilled with how chock full of practical and usable recipes are here. I love the author's tendency towards programmatic solutions as opposed to using IB and templates. I'm looking forward to dog-earing pages and using the heck out of this. I wish I... read more

Book in search of an audience

By I am the Torus "Twirling, twirling, twirling ... - October 14, 2010

The quality of the explanations, presentation, and organization of the topics covered by this book are excellent, but the utility of the book is ruined by the meat and potatoes of the content- the source code itself.

If you know enough Cocoa Touch to make sense of the source, the book won't be of any help to you. If you're trying to learn Cocoa Touch, you'll spend 90% of your time trying to make sense of the code instead of learning the putative subject at hand. If and when a beginner does figure out what's happening, they'll learn how to approach problems in manner that's guaranteed to get their app rejected, waste their time duplicating effort, and crash and burn horribly when an API changes.

Instead of following best practice design patterns, the source code inexplicably is stuffed into main.c with no commentary, uninformative variable names, and inconsistent formatting. More importantly, the code is technically lacking- it's full of memory leaks, release... read more