Learning iOS Programming: From Xcode to App Store [Tapa blanda]

I can't imagine who this book is for. Anyone who is expert enough to read it doesn't need it.

The book makes a lot of promises it doesn't live up to. The back cover says "very readable" and "everything an aspiring iOS programmer needs to get started..." (It is anything but!) The preface says "If you are developing on the Mac for the first time...this book is for you." (for you to use as a papwerweight?) All that is assumed, says the preface, is "at least passing knowledge of a C-derived language." I have more programming experience than that in a variety of programming languages, but by chapters 3 and 4, when it finally gets into actual code, I found this book to be a brick wall of incomprehensible jargon and unexplained code listings.

The teaching style is basically just "here's a pile of code" followed by cursory text that mostly tells you exactly what you could already see in the code -- an actual example is: "Here we see that...the class header file begins with the @interface directive and ends with the @end directive." (yes I can see those things -- so what?) Interspersed with the obvious is the impenetrable, such as: "In this class, we are relying on the instance variables for the properties to be automatically created when we synthesize them inside the implementation of the class." There are at least four major concepts in that sentence not introduced previously, and they aren't explained afterwards either.

I'm sure it would make sense to someone who already knows this material, but for the rest of us (and remember, the title starts with LEARNING) it would be nice if the book were arranged by a principle of introducing concepts and building on them rather than the everything-is-a-prerequisite-for-everything disorder I found in this book.

I have been following Alisdair Allan on twitter since I have been an astronomy buff. I have been wanting to learn coding all my life but have always been a Sales/Marketing/Strategy guy at Startups. Recently, when my startup received a small seed, I decided to push myself into coding. When I say, I am an absolute beginner, I am...I took a small course from Lynda.com on fundamentals of programming and being an Apple fan boy, I decided on jumping headfirst into iOS programming. Although, at the very beginning when I saw the quirky syntax of Objective-C, I was super discouraged however the author takes it step by step and his narrative style is like reading a novel and with examples. As a beginner, you start seeing things right away, the author has targeted this need of a beginner to see what he is coding, even when its just 4 lines of code, one can build and run and see whats being written and it makes perfect sense to see your small code working and in action.

I have seen and purchased actually 4 books on iOS programming (some of them are from O'Reilly) and they are absolute rubbish and not targeting the beginner at all. The topics covered in this book, range from TableView based applications (which form the core of cocoa touch and you will build almost 80% of your applications using this class) to network connection and Geo Mapping. The best part about the author is he is covered about network and using sensors which i have seldom seen in any book. I was impatient to wait for the 3rd edition and hence ordered the second edition, although I found out minor mistakes, I was happy to point out those mistakes to the author and he replied to me instantly over twitter suggesting those errors are fixed in the 3rd edition.

I highly recommend this book to any beginner who wants to dabble into iOS programming and no, the negative reviews just don't make sense and NO, this is not a paid review nor a early release program review.

A pedagogical disaster amid many bad practices in design and coding. This is the most sincere and concise description of this book. A major deception from an otherwise great publishing house.

There is a scarcity of good books on iOS programming and this one is just another sad addition to the pile. It is true that iOS is relatively new and not many people have enough experience and skills to master it, even less to be able to teach what they know. It could be that the best developers are too busy to write a book. But there is no excuse for the low quality in teaching and in coding that this book presents.

Another reviewer here stated that in this book what you usually find is "a pile of code followed by cursory text that mostly tells you exactly what you could already see in the code." Nothing could be explain it better. This style (or rather lack of teaching style!) is also present in the companion video that the author produced for the same publisher. Not surprisingly, this video provoked another very negative review from a different person.

The same reviewer here also mentioned a quote from the book: "we are relying on the instance variables for the properties to be automatically created when we synthesize them inside the implementation of the class". This happens when the author is trying to explain what properties in Objective-C classes are for. This lack of clarity is made even stronger by the fact that the author doesn't explain many concepts throughout the book.

Even more disturbing is the fact that the author doesn't use good coding and design styles. If the reader manages to learn something from the book, he may not really learn the subject matter well. Among other things, the author often writes code that is either inefficient or pedagogically bad.
Some examples: he doesn't consistently use the dot notation (that he should rather avoid anyway), he nests method calls way too many levels, he makes if statements comparing variables to nil explicitly, he writes inefficient code that cause duplication of efforts with no pedagogical benefit, he pretends to write great real-world applications that are actually not.

You may use this book to review what you know from iOS programming and appreciate that you know a lot more than you initially thought. But wouldn't it rather turn you into a masochist?

Unfortunately, this book will not help you to learn any iOS programming. And worse: it will not help you to learn good programming practices. It will rather confuse you and make you think that some programming practices are good, when in fact they are bad.
And it will make you think that iOS programming is this heavy load when, in reality, it is a lot of fun.