Great Price "iPhone User Interface Design Projects" for $22.25 Today

Love it or loathe it, the iPhone and iPod touch have been a stunning success, largely due to the App Store -- over 100,000 apps at current count. It is, by all accounts, the largest gold rush to invade the application development scene since ... well, ever. Apps that pay attention to design and usability stand out from the rest of the detritus, and quickly become a success.

"iPhone User Interface Design Projects" devotes a single chapter to each of ten developers/designers who've stood out from the crowd. They talk us through their thought processes and workflows, their failures and ultimate successes. You can teach someone to write code, but can you teach something as subjective as interface design? Apple's "Human Interface Guidelines" document goes some way to achieving this goal, explaining what users expect from an iPhone app's interface, and how the various controls behave and interact. The HIG is an essential reference and fits the bill perfectly for most use cases, but doesn't offer insights into more creative interfaces. "iPhone User Interface Design Projects" augments the HIG by bringing the authors' experiences into the discussion. They explain what worked and what didn't - there's nothing like learning from other people's mistakes.

A common thread throughout the book is that design and usability is an iterative process - very rarely will your first design concept reach the App Store. Though the individual authors refer to it differently - wireframing, prototyping, mock-ups, etc. - you get a sense for the importance of knowing what the interface will look like and how it will behave before committing it to code. The book's technical reviewer, Joachim Bondo, contributes a chapter on the design of a prospective Google news reader. Refreshing in presentation, this isn't a post-development retrospective. As he explains in the chapter's introduction, he has a few ideas in his head, and he fleshes the designs out as your read along. You don't get to see the final interface, but that's not the point. What you do get is insight into his design decisions. Bret Victor presented the excellent "Prototyping iPhone User Interfaces" at WWDC '09, and Bondo's narrative is very similar in content.

Though I enjoyed (almost) all ten contributions, Chapter 7, for me, was the highlight of the book. Chris Parrish and Brad Ellis cover - in great detail - often overlooked concepts of user context and application flow, and the undeniable value of prototyping and specifications. Parrish and Ellis rightly won an Apple Design Award at WWDC '09 for "Postage", a visual and highly intuitive postcard creator, and they approach their chapter with similar attention to detail.

The odd-one-out is Jurgen Siebert's detailed discussion of typefaces, the implications of their usage on small-scale devices such as the iPhone, and a walkthrough of his "FontShuffle" app. As informative as the history and anatomy of typefaces was for me, I didn't see how it specifically related to the very restricted set of fonts on the iPhone. Siebert even goes so far as to mock up a Contacts screen with a font that isn't available on the device, suggesting that the screen's readability has improved as a result. I don't disagree; however, the iPhone's fonts are baked-in, and unless you want to implement a custom glyph rendering routine, it's a pointless argument on a closed device. This chapter represents a missed opportunity, in my opinion. I was initially looking forward to reading about the author's choice of available fonts under different scenarios, but was ultimately let down.

Where the book falls short is in its use of black and white screeenshots throughout. We're talking about the design of applications which are displayed on a full colour device. Colour clearly plays a very large part in the design of any user interface, so cheaping out with black and white screenshots was a mistake. What's even more unforgivable is that the downloadable eBook (which isn't free) doesn't have full colour plates! Come on, Apress! I think given the context of the book, we'd be prepared to pay a bit more for colour.

Who's this book for? Everyone who develops or designs for iPhone, novice to expert alike. Even if you've had success on the App Store, I guarantee there's something in here for you.

iPhone User Interface Design Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430223597
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

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iPhone User Interface Design Projects Overviews

With over 100,000 iPhone applications and 125,000 registered iPhone developers, is it still possible to create a top-selling app that stands apart from the six-figure crowd? Of course, but you’ll need more than a great idea and flawless code—an eye-catching and functional user interface design is essential. With this book, you’ll get practical advice on user interface design from 10 innovative developers who, like you, have sat wondering how to best utilize the iPhone’s minimal screen real estate. Their stories illustrate precisely why, with more apps and more experienced, creative developers, no iPhone app can succeed without a great UI.

Whatever type of iPhone project you have in mind—social networking app, game, or reference tool—you’ll benefit from the information presented in this book. More than just tips and pointers, you’ll learn from the authors’ hands-on experiences, including:

• Dave Barnard of App Cubby on how to use Apple’s User Interface conventions and test for usability to assure better results
• Joachim Bondo, creator of Deep Green Chess, beats a classic design problem of navigating large dataset results in the realm of the iPhone
• Former Apple employee Dan Burcaw tailors user interfaces and adds the power of CoreLocation, Address Book, and Camera to the social networking app, Brightkite
• David Kaneda takes his Basecamp project management client, Outpost, from a blank page (literally) to a model of dashboard clarity
• Craig Kemper focuses on the smallest details to create his award-winning puzzle games TanZen and Zentomino
• Tim Novikoff, a graduate student in applied math with no programming experience, reduces a complex problem to simplicity in Flash of Genius: SAT Vocab
• Long-time Mac developer Chris Parrish goes into detail on the creation of the digital postcard app, Postage, which won the 2009 Apple Design Award
• Flash developer Keith Peters provides solutions for bringing games that were designed for a desktop screen to the small, touch-sensitive world of the iPhone
• Jürgen Siebert, creator of FontShuffle, outlines the anatomy of letters and how to select the right fonts for maximum readability on the iPhone screen
• Eddie Wilson, an interactive designer, reveals the fine balance of excellent design and trial-by-fire programming used to create his successful app Snow Report

Combined with Apress’ best-selling Beginning iPhone 3 Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, you’ll be prepared to match great code with striking design and create the app that everyone is talking about.

What you’ll learn

• Optimize your design for the iPhone’s limited screen real estate and the mobile environment
• Create a user interface that is eye-catching and stands apart from the crowd
• Maximize your use of typographic elements for style and readability
• Perfect entry views and display large amounts of data in an exciting way
• Translate games made for the desktop’s big screen to the iPhone
• Strike the perfect balance between simplicity, beauty, and features

Who is this book for?

iPhone application developers of all experience levels and development platforms

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Customer Review

Sexy design sells! - H. Wu - Brooklyn, NY USA
Apple's iPhone SDK/Cocoa Touch framework provides some very elegant UI widgets out of the box. It's a beautiful thing when you design your app's interface, and it comes great-looking already. However, us programmers tend to be lacking skills in interactive design and awesome usability. This book comes in for the rescue.

Authors of this book have been to the trenches, and they wrote their own experiences and their thought processes here in their chapters. It's amazing how a little app has so much design decisions involved.
Chapter 1 - How and why design apps that have similar look and feel like the default built-in Apple apps, and some tips on whether to tap or not, and usability testing.
Chapter 2 - The author takes on the Google news reader, and improves the navigation and re-structured his app design to be more efficient.
Chapter 3 - The author talks about the differences between web and native apps, and some best practices and tricks
Chapter 4 - The author shows how the design evolved along with design decisions and adjustments
Chapter 5 - This is my favorite chapter. The author discuss in depth of how to design UI interactions with iPhone's unique size and features. The discussion on rotations is especially thought-provoking!
Chapter 6 - This chapter shows that even designing a very simple and basic app, it still takes consideration on usability and appropriate user interactions.
Chapter 7 - This chapter is great in showing you many ways to tune your app details into great enhancements to your apps. Little details you would otherwise take for granted or ignored.
Chapter 8 - As a programmer, I'm happy to see some codes behind the app. This chapter shows you how to build a simple but interesting game, with the focus of how to receive user interactions with minimal efforts. Codes are provided so it's a great read!
Chapter 9 - The author talks about different font styles and typefaces.
Chapter 10 - The author shows us many tips and tricks during the entire app development life cycle.

Overall, this book shows us how iPhone apps are developed from a different angle. Many great tips/tricks and real-world experiences. It's a great read w/ about 240 pages. Any iPhone programmer would learn a thing or two from this book. My only complain is that some chapters are too short. Hopefully 2nd edition of this book can include additional iPhone app designers/developers :)

Related to Items You've Viewed

• iPhone Advanced Projects
• More iPhone 3 Development: Tackling iPhone SDK 3 (Beginning)
• iPhone Cool Projects
• The Business of iPhone App Development: Making and Marketing Apps that Succeed
• iPhone Design Award-Winning Projects (The Definitive Guide)

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Great Price "Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer (Books for Professionals by Professionals)" for $0.98 Today

The past few years have seen the English-language Ruby book market explode. Before the phenomenal success of Rails it was perfectly possible to own every available title (and not use much storage space), but now that would be quite a challenge and lead to considerable redundancy. Having worked my way through quite a few Rails books of late, reading Practical Ruby Projects--a Ruby book that doesn't even mention web frameworks--was both a pleasant diversion and a highly illuminating experience.

Like the last volume I reviewed (Pro JavaScript Design Patterns), this book is unabashedly aimed at experienced programmers. There's a brief paragraph on "getting set up", but no detailed guide to obtaining the tools. Instead we dive right in to a sequence of projects that includes: making music (dipping into calling C code from ruby), animation, simulation, building a strategy game (and adding a RubyCocoa frontend), genetic algorithms, and even implementing lisp and parsers. Once again the "apress roadmap," a diagram intended to show how the skillsets in their different volumes build on one another, is misleading pitching this between "Beginning Ruby" and other volumes I've reviewed like Practical Ruby for System Administration and Pro Active Record. Don't believe it. Though there's little overlap in the material, this is a more advanced volume than either of those and readers should be prepared.

The pace of the book is measured and Topher Cyll does a good job of gradually building up the projects a step at a time. Along the way a variety of practices are demonstrated with many methods stubbed out for demonstration purposes before being filled in when they are needed, and considerable time spent on decoupling code. That latter piece is particularly in evidence in the chapters on building a turn-based strategy game and then developing a RubyCocoa front-end. Despite careful design early on further refactoring is needed to make it easy to apply the front-end and that process is carefully worked through.

Most of the book makes some use of existing libraries. The initial lisp chapter uses the sexp library and the subsequent section on writing a parse relies on rparsec. For the most part, however, use of the libraries is kept to a minimum, allowing for fairly self-contained code. Unit testing is largely ignored until the last chapter, where the need for tests when constructing a grammar/parser is explained and a test-first development model is encouraged. That works well to demonstrate the power of tests for complex (and often brittle) code.

This is not a book designed for public transport reading. Working through chapters on the bus I frequently found myself wanting to reach for my laptop to get a better grasp of how a piece of code worked. While the explanation is generally very good, with material of this complexity there is nothing like running the code and tweaking it to make sure you've understood exactly what each transformation does. It's a book to take your time over, so be prepared!

A few editorial errors have crept in, suggesting a re-organisation of the contents late in the day. In particular an early reference to s-expressions seemed to presume that the lisp and/or parsing chapters were featured early. That's not a big deal and will hopefully be corrected in later printings; the author does encourage skipping around within the book, but there is value in working through it roughly in order, and not just for the two "paired" chapters that explicitly build on one another.

Perhaps the most striking thing about this book is the reminder that even for those of us whose primary programming activity is web development, studying other areas can be extremely helpful. Not only is it helpful to see how other developers structure their code, but tools like genetic algorithms and parsers are likely to be very helpful where web applications require sophisticated processing and/or backend systems. And it never hurts to learn a little lisp. For the ruby developer who's comfortable with the language and wants to stretch out a little, this book would be an excellent investment.

Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher.


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Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer (Books for Professionals by Professionals) Overviews

Want to take Ruby to the limit? Looking for new, powerful, and creative ideas that will take Ruby beyond Rails and web programming? If you’re comfortable with Ruby, you’ll be itching to go further—apply Practical Ruby Projects: Ideas for the Eclectic Programmer and become a master of advanced Ruby techniques.

Rubyist Topher Cyll brings several imaginative projects to this book, ranging from making generative music, animations, and turn–based games to implementing simulations, algorithms, and even an implementation of Lisp!

Art, music, theory, and games—this book has it all. Best of all, it’s all done with Ruby.

Each chapter, in addition to making you say “Cool—I hadn’t thought of that before,” looks at solving tricky development problems, enforces best practices, and encourages creative thinking. You’ll be building your own exciting, imaginative ruby projects in no time.

• Create imaginative and innovative Ruby programming projects.
• Learn how to solve tricky development problems, be guided by best practices, and be inspired to think creatively.
• Don’t waste time on the basics—it’s assumed you know the fundamentals of Ruby already.

What you’ll learn

• How to set up Ruby on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux
• How to create UIs with RubyCocoa
• How to create a Lisp implementation in Ruby
• How to create generative music and turn–based adventure games in Ruby
• How to model things and create algorithms in Ruby
• Several more Ruby best practices and programming techniques that will save you hours of programming time

Who is this book for?

This book is for anyone who has mastered the basics of Ruby and wants to learn advanced Ruby techniques.

About the Apress Practical Series

The Practical series from Apress is your best choice for getting the job done, period. From professional to expert, this series lets you apply project–motivated templates (or frameworks) step by step in a very direct, practical, and efficient manner toward current real–world projects that may be sitting on your desk. So whatever your career goal, Apress can be your trusted guide to take you where you want to go on your IT career empowerment path.

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Customer Review

Easy Read - Harold Campbell - Jamaica
This is one of the rare technical books, that's actually quite fun to read. Additionally, all except the last two chapters can be read out of turn. I think this is an excellent book. Take the time and get excited by taking a fresh look at ruby.

Feet first and freewheeling - Ian Dees - Portland, OR USA
The hands-on style of this book is contagious; you'll find yourself really wanting to jump in and try out the code samples. The source is available on Topher's site, but the simplicity and sense of immediacy are such that you may want to just start typing it in yourself. In a few minutes, you're making music or creating a game.

Related to Items You've Viewed

• Practical Ruby for System Administration (Expert's Voice in Open Source)
• Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition
• The Ruby Programming Language
• Design Patterns in Ruby
• Ruby Cookbook (Cookbooks (O'Reilly))

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iPhone Advanced Projects Review

As the name suggested, this book talks about advanced iPhone programming topics. Each of the 11 chapters packs loads of information and real world experience from the authors. You will actually spend more time to digest the information than just reading it. Highly recommended to experienced and seasoned iPhone developers, but also offers quite some insights for developers new to the iPhone scene. You will be amazed on how much you can learn from the authors of the book. And lots of code samples throughout the book, you won't be disappointed.

Chapter 1 - Great introduction to the particle system, the very basic element for many types of games.
Chapter 2 - Interesting coverage on how to build a networked app/game, with the help of Google's free App Engine service using Python.
Chapter 3 - Using Core Audio to do audio streaming. This chapter is quite hardcore for me, but I was able to follow through and learned quite a lot about how audio streaming works and some tricks as well.
Chapter 4 - This chapter is right on the money - debugging! The author showed a few different approaches when debugging your iPhone apps.
Chapter 5 - This chapter covers basic SQLite operations in your codes. Currently there's no Objective-C delegate/wrappers for SQLite operations, so everything is in C fashion. There are other frameworks for a better interface with SQLite.
Chapter 6 - If you don't like dealing with SQLite, with the introduction of iPhone SDK 3.0, you can use Core Data :) This chapter shows you how Core Data and KVC protocol works.
Chapter 7 - How to send emails from your apps w/o going to the email client. The author shows both online and offline modes, as well as a nice introduction to three20 framework.
Chapter 8 - This chapter talks about networking issues, sockets, wifi detection, power management, etc. Also some insights if you want to roll out your own networking protocol stacks.
Chapter 9 - This is my favorite chapter talking about how to design an effective and responsive user interface. NSOperation and NSOperationQueue are covered, as well as tips & tricks on how to display large amount of data w/o slowing down.
Chapter 10 - Very nice introduction to Apple's push notification service, including both setup steps and server side scripts.
Chapter 11 - Mapping and Reflection on OpenGL ES. This is a brief introduction to OpenGL ES environment mapping and reflection. I wish this chapter is longer and has more coverage in depth. But again, this is not an OpenGL ES book, the topic itself deserves a whole other book.

Overall, this book is pretty advanced in many aspects of the iPhone SDK frameworks. Coverage on SDK 3.0 frameworks are much welcomed and the competence of the authors are undeniable. Again, I highly recommend this book to any iPhone developer, no matter how seasoned you are, you will learn a thing or two from this book.

iPhone Advanced Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430224037
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Rating :

Price : $39.99

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Overviews

As the fourth book in our series of iPhone Projects based on the work and experiences of iPhone, this volume takes on the more advanced aspects of iPhone development. The first generation of iPhone applications has hit the App Store, and now it's time to optimize performance, streamline the user interface, and make every successful iPhone app just that much more sophisticated.

Paired with Apress's bestselling Beginning iPhone Development: Exploring the iPhone SDK, you'll have everything you need to create the next great iPhone app that everyone is talking about.

• Optimize performance.
• Streamline your user interface.
• Do things with your iPhone app that other developers haven't attempted.

Along with Series Editor Dave Mark, your guides for this exploration of the next level of iPhone development, include:

• Ben “Panda” Smith, discussing particle systems using OpenGL ES
• Joachim Bondo , demonstrating his implementation of correspondence gaming in the most recent version of his chess application, Deep Green.
• Tom Harrington implementing streaming audio with Core Audio, one of many iPhone OS 3 APIs.
• Owen Goss debugging those pesky errors in your iPhone code with an eye toward achieving professional-strength results.
• Dylan Bruzenak building a data-driven application with SQLite.
• Ray Kiddy illustrating the full application development life cycle with Core Data.
• Steve Finkelstein marrying an offline eMail client to Core Data.
• Peter Honeder and Florian Pflug tackling the challenges of networked applications in WiFi environments.
• Jonathan Saggau improving interface responsiveness with some of his personal tips and tricks, including “blocks” and other esoteric techniques.
• Joe Pezzillo pushing the frontiers of APNS, the new in iPhone OS 3 Apple Push Notification Service that makes the Cloud the limit for iPhone apps.
• Noel Llopis taking mere programmers into a really advanced developmental adventure into the world of Environment Mapping with OpenGL ES.

What you'll learn

• Use wi-fi to do more than simply connect to the Internet.
• Communicate with other iPhone users in real time.
• Take advantage of all the tricks built into Cocoa Touch.
• Convert your iPhone and iPod touch apps for use in other environments.
• Convert your other mobile apps for use with iPhone and iPod touch.

Who is this book for?

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform, though this title is the natural choice after any of the other iPhone X Projects books.

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Customer Review

Too Many Mistakes to be Useful - Clifford Sharp - Longmont, CO
I DO NOT recommend this book at all for any level of iPhone developer(s).

One of the projects actually just takes an Apple code example and adds a few methods here and there. I don't have to buy a book to do that. One project adds some methods and ivar's to files that are generated files per Core Data. This is always a bad idea.

There are many mistakes in the source code in the book. The source code in the book doesn't match the downloadable source code in many places. The downloadable source code fails to build and is missing files. I found such obvious errors in the downloadable source like no semicolon at the end of some of the lines. This code was obviously never built and/or tested.

This book was very poorly and hastily put together. Don't waste your money, but more importantly, don't waste your time.

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iPhone Cool Projects

iPhone Cool Projects Review

When reading introductory books in any language, it is easy to learn the language elements and concepts, but it is hard to see how everything fits together. What is great about the cool projects series from Apress is being able to see the elements and concepts in practice with projects from professionals who are active in the field.

Each chapter is written by a different author, so every project covers a different experience and topic. These range from touch interfaces to streaming audio over the network. Some of the projects presented are based on the author's live applications that are currently available through the App Store. A wide range of the topics are covered in the book with practical examples of the concepts.

This book is definitely not an introduction to Cocoa or iPhone programming. It is more geared toward the intermediate reader who has learned the basics and needs practical, real-life examples. It can also be of use to a more experienced iPhone programmer who wants to explore some of the topics in the book without having to dig through the documentation.

I would highly recommend this book because it is easy to read and does not get bogged down with basic concepts. Code is provided on the book's site and is easy to follow the code with the explanations in the book. As a beginning iPhone programmer, I found this book to be a lot of help to work out some of the concepts I was having trouble with.

iPhone Cool Projects Features

• ISBN13: 9781430223573
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

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Overviews

The iPhone and iPod touch have provided all software developers with a level playing field—developers working alone have the same access to consumers as multinational software publishers. Very cool indeed! To make your application stand out from the crowd, though, it has to have that something extra. You must learn the skills to take your apps from being App Store filler to download chart-topping blockbusters.

Developers with years of experience helped write this book. Spend some time understanding their code and why they took the approach they did. You will find the writing, illustrations, code, and sample applications second to none. No matter what type of application you are writing, you will find something in this book to help you make your app that little bit cooler.

The book opens with Wolfgang Ante, the developer behind the Frenzic puzzle game, showing how timers, animation, and intelligence are used to make game play engaging. It moves on to Rogue Amoeba's Mike Ash explaining how to design a network protocol using UDP, and demonstrating its use in a peer-to-peer application—a topic not normally for the faint of heart, but explained here in a way that makes sense to mere mortals. Gary Bennett then covers the important task of multithreading. Multithreading can be used to keep the user interface responsive while working on other tasks in the background. Gary demonstrates how to do this and highlights traps to avoid along the way.

Next up, Canis Lupus (aka Matthew Rosenfeld) describes the development of the Keynote-controlling application Stage Hand, how the user interface has evolved, and the lessons he has learned from that experience. Benjamin Jackson then introduces two open source libraries: cocos2d, for 2D gaming; and Chipmunk, for rigid body physics (think “collisions”). He describes the development of Arcade Hockey, an air hockey game, and explains some of the code used for this.

Neil Mix of Pandora Radio reveals the science behind processing streaming audio. How do you debug what you can't see? Neil guides you through the toughest challenges, sharing his experience of what works and what to watch out for when working with audio. Finally, Steven Peterson demonstrates a comprehensive integration of iPhone technologies. He weaves Core Location, networking, XML, XPath, and SQLite into a solid and very useful application.

Software development can be hard work. Introductory books lay the foundation, but it can be challenging to understand where to go next. This book shows some of the pieces that can be brought together to make complete, cool applications.

Who is this book for?

All iPhone application developers with any level of experience or coming from any development platform

Summary of Contents

1. Wolfgang Ante - Designing a Simple, Frenzic-Style Puzzle Game
2. Mike Ash - Mike Ash’s Deep Dive Into Peer-to-Peer Networking
3. Gary Bennett - Doing Several Things at Once: Performance Enhancements with Threading
4. Matthew “Canis” Rosenfeld - All Fingers and Thumbs: Multitouch Interface Design and Implementation
5. Benjamin Jackson - Physics, Sprites, and Animation with the cocos2d-iPhone Framework
6. Neil Mix - Serious Streaming Audio the Pandora Radio Way
7. Steven Peterson - Going the Routesy Way with Core Location, XML, and SQLite

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Customer Review

Poorly Written - Christopher Morris -
I bought this book because I wanted to see code that successful iPhone developers had written. I guess I was looking for "best practices" sort of information and I was hoping that I might get insight on how to tackle some problems I have run into when developing my own applications.

Book Flow

The biggest disappointment in this book is that developers wrote it (I am assuming). The book lacks the continuity you would normally find when one or two people collaborate on an entire book. When a different person writes each chapter, you get seven different styles in this book. I found a couple of the chapters very well written, but the rest I found to be, well, written by developers. I'm not saying that developers are inherently bad at writing, but it takes a certain something to relay information to other developers effectively. Most of the writers of this book just do not have it.

Code Samples

I got very frustrated reading chapters with code snippets from applications the various authors had written. If a working application had been available to provide context to the snippets, then I would have been less frustrated. For example, in Chapter 5, the first 12 pages of the chapter provide code snippets with very brief explanations of what the code is supposed to do. No working example is provided for context. I couldn't even play with the code to see what was going on. It was almost like I was expected just to know the context because I was on the team that wrote the application. The last 10 pages actually create a working sample. I would have rather spent the entire chapter creating the application with better explanations of each step and theory behind the code.

Proofreading

I wish I had a dollar for all the typos I've seen in this book. Again, in chapter 5, page 118 there is a screen shot of the application the author wrote. The caption says it's a screen shot of the application that you will be writing at the end of the chapter. Sloppy.

Conclusion

I feel like I did get some useful information from this book. Was it worth the frustration of reading poorly written text, no context for code snippets, and numerous errors? Not in my opinion.

Looks good on paper, but the devil's in the details - David Ruedger -
I bought this after seeing the high reviews from others on this site. Unfortunately, the content doesn't quite live up to the hype for me. I got this in particular wanting more details about threading having come from the Windows world where I have implemented very robust networking applications that require UI responsiveness while results are cached in the background. I was hoping this book would shed some light on how to go about doing this in the iPhone paradigm, but the example is so rudimentary that it almost isn't even worth putting into the book. Plus, the instructions for building the app are incorrect and contain glaring omissions as well as references to code objects that don't even exist. What's worse is the code itself as listed in the book doesn't even run when built! It causes an unhandled exception due to objects created in the header file not being instantiated or initialized in the implementation file. And no where in the chapter does it say you must download the source code for the example. It walks you through it as if it has been checked and is guaranteed to work as printed. Once you download the source code, it becomes apparent how rushed or poorly thought through this portion of the book was. Whole sections of the header and implementation files are glaringly omitted from the book. Did Bennett even bother proofreading this part of the book, and if so, where were the editors in this process? It's shameful for a book that is marketed as a technical tome to increase a developer's proficiency on the platform.

I'll admit that I haven't delved into other parts of the book in great detail, but the game portion did look pretty interesting at first glance. However, the hands on experience I had with the threading chapter left a very bad first impression and does not leave me all too optimistic on either the usefulness or accuracy of the additional content in the book.

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