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3 Excellent Books on iPhone Development

adit — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 05:03:26 +0000

iPhone has been a rage among users ever since it was launched in 2007 and it continues to be the leading mobile device today with millions of applications in the App Store. It has revolutionized mobile computing by giving everybody an opportunity to develop their own applications for the platform. You probably want to develop your own iPhone application, but the question is – Where to begin? There are hundreds of books available on iPhone programming, but not all of them are good enough to give you a quick head-start. In this article, we’ll tell you about three excellent book on iPhone development, which can quickly get you started with iPhone (and even iPad!) application development.

1. Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK

This is perhaps the best book for beginners in iPhone development. The book starts with the basics, walking you through the process of downloading and installing Apple’s free iPhone SDK, then stepping you though the creation of your first simple iPhone application. You’ll move on from there, mastering all the iPhone interface elements that you’ve come to know and love, such as buttons, switches, pickers, toolbars, sliders, etc. It will also introduce you to some more advanced topics like GPS API’s and accelerometer. It’s really a must have book for anyone interested in getting started quickly and efficiently with iPhone development.

2. iPhone Programming – The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

This book leads you through essential tools and techniques for developing applications for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. You’ll learn about mapping services, accessing accelerometer data, handling multi-touch gestures, ways of sorting and loading data, communication with web services and localization. The book has numerous visual cues and code samples, which will help you get a hang of iPhone programming. It really deserves a place on your bookshelf.

3. Programming in Objective C

The book is not iPhone specific, but it’s still very useful as you need to have a solid foundation in Objective C if you want to develop some really cool iPhone applications. The book assumes no prior programming knowledge and serves as an excellent guide for beginners. You’ll learn about the basics of Objective C programming, Foundation Framework and Cocoa and iPhone SDK.The separation of these main topics, Objective-C Language features and the Foundation Framework for example, almost guarantees that there won’t be much confusion if you are learning the language for the first time and that there will be a distinction between the topics and concepts for each section.

I hope you’ll find these books useful in iPhone application development. Do provide us your reviews in the comments section. :)

Version Control Application for your iPhone

rohit — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 18:53:17 +0000

iVersion is an iPhone SVN client which allows developers to edit and manage their code away form their desktop. More information can be found at http://www.benreeves.co.uk. IDB readers can get it for free by using the following promo codes:

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iPhone Application a day – Everyday – with Code

rohit — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:41:39 +0000

A brilliant blogger / coder by name Matt is making an iphone app every day, posting detailed information about it and also sharing the code with the masses. Enormous resource for all iPhone developers.

OpenGL ES Tips and Tricks for Game Programming

rohit — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 07:32:52 +0000

We all know OpenGL ES only accepts textures that are power 2. What if we have non standard textures ? Craig Giles has posted a solution for the same with the code snippet.

[source Journey into XNA]

iPhone 3.0 Programming Examples and Tutorials

rohit — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:46:18 +0000

This is a gold mine for all those who are looking for examples and tutorials for iphone application development. The examples include making your first app, editable detail view, animating a view, table views etc. Get a kick-start in iphone development, check the site now.

Creating your own iPhone Framework!

rohit — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 06:48:27 +0000

Scott means has posted couple of resources for developing your own iPhone framework. iPhone development frameworks can be used in various iPhone application / game development projects. Few popular examples are Unity 3D, JSON Framework etc.

How to Develop / Create a Shopping Cart Application for iPhone ?

rohit — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 11:10:03 +0000

A 30 minute video tutorial demonstrating the entire coding process of developing a shopping cart app for iphone / ipod touch is published here. The author is also kind enough to share the entire source code for the application.

[source OnlineTutorialVids]

XML Parsing Frameworks for iPhone Development

rohit — Wed, 06 May 2009 14:06:29 +0000

An excellent article by Mike on various XML frameworks available for iPhone SDK, particularly, TouchXML, KissXML. The article discusses the advantages and disadvantages of using each one of them. As Sourcebits we extensively use TinyXML framework in our projects and highly recommend it too.

[source 71squared]

Resources to Learn 3D and Game programming on iPhone

rohit — Sun, 26 Apr 2009 17:42:34 +0000

For doing programming in 3D on iPhone, either we use the OpenGLES or use existing 3D frameworks like Unity3D, Oblong engine etc. Here are 8 great resources that will help you get started in 3D and game development on iPhone.

[source Maniacdev]

How to make your iPhone application accelerometer / rotation aware ?

rohit — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:41:33 +0000

A very detailed iPhone Development tutorial in which author uses the example of a digital clock to describe how the app can handle the rotation using iPhone accelerometer api calls. Source code included.

[source theappleblog]

Open Source Objective C Library for Facebook Connect

rohit — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:12:52 +0000

Joe Hewitt, has released the facebook source code library in Objective C for iPhone developers. This is a real good resource for developers that are looking to integrate their iPhone applications with Facebook. Download it from here.

[source infoworld]

jQTouch – jQuery plugin for iPhone Web Development

rohit — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:02:31 +0000

jQTouch is a jQuery plugin that allows development of iphone web applications with native animations and default application styles. Alpha release is available here.

Facebook Connect Software Development Kit (SDK) for iPhone

rohit — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:00:22 +0000

Good news for iPhone developers, Facebook has released a SDK for iPhone; Facebook Connect, that allows developers to hook up their native iPhone applications with the Facebook and take advantage of the vast facebook userbase. Download the SDK from here.

Native iPhone Applications using JavaScript, HTML & CSS ?

rohit — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 05:55:01 +0000

Yes, creating native iPhone applications using common web technologies is possible now, using PhoneGap. PhoneGap is a cross platform mobile framework that lets any web developer make native iPhone, Android and Blackberry applications.

Programming Dates in iPhone SDK

rohit — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 04:37:27 +0000

If you have been troubled with mundane tasks like Get Today’s date while developing your iPhone applications then this tutorial is for you.

[source howtomakeiphoneapps]

OpenAL Audio Programming on iPhone

rohit — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 07:21:38 +0000

An excellent tutorial along with code snippets for writing an OpenAL sound loader, OpenAL wrapper class and actual code to play some audio files in iPhone.

[source Gehacktes]

Multi Threaded Image Loading

rohit — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:40:13 +0000

A very thorough article including the source code, for loading multiple images from sites like flickr in your iphone app in an asynchronous manner, so that delay is less and user experience is quick and neat. Read it here.

Code for Sending email from your iPhone App

rohit — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:19:08 +0000

A quick and short tutorial plus code for calling mail app in iphone from your application and automatically filling in the address, subject and content. Read it here.

[source iCodeBlog]

Extending the iPhone’s SDK’s UIColor class

rohit — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 07:31:09 +0000

A very detailed article along with code samples for extending iPhone SDK UIColor class and make it more useful by Ars Technica.

Memory Management for iPhone Applications

rohit — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 06:43:52 +0000

Managing memory is very important part of iPhone software development because of the hardware limitations. If the memory is not managed properly it leads to all those embarrassing crashes that can be avoided by following this excellent list of resources and tutorials for memory management on iPhone.

[source MobileOrchard]

iWebKit 4.0: iPhone Webapps Framework

rohit — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 08:08:02 +0000

iWebKit framework allows for easy creation of iPhone webapps/websites and requires very little programming knowledge.

[source iPhone World]

Interesting tidbits for OpenGL programming on iPhone

rohit — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 09:29:44 +0000

I have been following this blog for sometime and must say the author Wolfgang Engel is posting some of the best tips for game programmers on iPhone. A must bookmark for every iPhone programmer.

UITabBarController Tutorial

rohit — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 13:46:25 +0000

The UITabBarController is a container that helps switch between different views using tabs, as can be seen in number of iPhone apps like NyTimes, MarketingProfs etc. A very nice tutorial on how to use this container along with source code for iPhone programming is posted by MIT student Edward Benson on his blog. Read it here.

[source Edward Benson Blog]

Porting Ruby Apps to iPhone

rohit — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:38:21 +0000

Rhodes, a new open source toolkit developed by Rhomobile makes it possible to port Ruby applications on to iPhone, Windows Mobile devices, and the BlackBerry.

[source MobileOrchard]

A review of available iPhone programming books

rohit — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 07:05:36 +0000

A review of three books that are available for iPhone programmers: Programming in Objective-C, Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK and The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook.

Read it here.

[source iPhone Obsessed]

Oolong Game Engine for iPhone

rohit — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 01:59:57 +0000

The Oolong Engine is written in C++ with some help from Objective-C. It will help you to create new games and port existing games to the iPhone and the iPod touch. The best part is, its free.

User Interface Design Resources for iPhone Developers

rohit — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 13:27:33 +0000

Several tutorials, links, and resources that you can use in your iPhone user interface design process. Check it here.

[source MobileOrchard]