Reviews for Cocoa Touch for iPhone OS 3 (Developer Reference)

1. A reasonable treatment of some concepts, but badly let down by errors and omissions

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, January 12th, 2010

   This is a useful additional text to refer to if you're struggling with the way other titles cover the concepts, but it's badly let down by the level of detail and amount of typos. There's a sprinkling of errors that really should have been caught at the technical review stage, and the author has an irritating habit of veering between full code listings, and partial excerpts with notes like "remember to import the headers". This stops you blindly typing in the code without thinking about it, but makes debugging much more difficult without downloading the source code.
   
   The blurb talks about "joining the gold rush to developing cool iPhone apps", and this seems to have been the approach taken to reviewing and subediting this book - it was clearly rushed out before being properly finished. Although it's a reasonable coverage of some topics, I wouldn't recommend this as the only book to buy if you're looking to pick up iPhone development from scratch.
   
   And for publishers not to have online errata for their titles is frankly inexcusable in this day and age, and it'll make me think twice about buying Wiley titles in the future.

2. Disappointing

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, December 12th, 2009

   It's not a bad book, but it certainly doesn't cover things to the level of detail something like Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X does, and it's let down by the editing.
   
   There are a load of errors in the same code (things like :error instead of :&error for example) that mean you frequently have to refer to the Xcode reference documentation. This partly defeats the point of having such a book.
   
   The level of detail covered in topics is also nowhere near good enough. An example is the core data section. Sure, it explains accessing and retrieving entities, and the example does use two entities with a relationship between them. However, at no point does it cover creating an entity that includes a reference to another entity.
   
   I found myself having to spend far too much time on Google looking for clarifications and corrections to feel that I got value for money from this purchase. Had I browsed this in a bookstore, I certainly would not have bought it, and I now regret it.