Reviews for iPhone Application Development for Dummies

1. Enough to put anyone off before they've got started with iphone dev!

   Rated 2 out of 5 stars, February 12st, 2010

   I bought this book as I am a complete beginner to iphone development. I've been patiently reading over a hundred pages of theory written in an infuriatingly tongue-in-cheek and patronising style, before the author finally allowed me to have a go at writing some code. By the time you get to coding you will have been bored almost to tears as the author congratulates himself on the achievements of his "mickey-mouse" apps like Travel 411, Find me, and so on. Basically, he's reinventing the wheel each time. Anyway, when you DO get to write some code it's like - read one page of text, write on line of code. Everything is explained in far too much detail. After a while you realise that you're actually implementing one of the author's dull apps - the very one that he was "bigging up" in the earlier chapters. I have made it half way through the book but the last half seems like quite a slog so I might swap to a different iphone dev book instead.

2. Good

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, September 12th, 2009

   This book will get you started, its easy to follow and the rants within keep you reading on.
   Recommended!

3. The worst iPhone development tutorial so far

   Rated 1 out of 5 stars, September 12rd, 2009

   I am not really keen on the Dummies books style, but I am buying all the iPhone development books on the market, so I bought this one too. And I was amazed by how poorly the book is written. Here are just a few facts about it.
   
   This book has in it 370 pages. The first few lines of code are expected to be written by the reader only on page 124. Most of the previous pages are filled with all sorts of general considerations and theory that are supposed to be helpful for Dummies... I didn't see any other book on iPhone development that would contain *that* amount of theory! I was really struggling with sleep when reading those pages. But let's go further.
   
   The author tries to avoid writing a "Hello World" application because it is so trivial and he wants to be different. As a result he shows a no-op application, that is, a typical "Hello World" thing that just doesn't say "Hello World": it does absolutely nothing! How illuminating can be that - I am not sure.
   
   By page 134, when the reader has about a dozen lines of code under his or her belt, Neal Goldstein hits a user interface problem created by himself and by page 141 he is already throwing at the reader Notifications - a topic which in the other books would have been left for one of the last chapters. The author is really struggling with his trivial example application and I believe that this is where most readers will stop reading, even if they were able to get to this point.
   
   I regret that I bought this book, but now I am going to keep it as an example of how books should not be written - especially tutorial style books that pretend to be able to teach.

4. A good starter

   Rated 4 out of 5 stars, June 12th, 2009

   I have a few books on this subject, but this book explained a few things in a much more straight-forward way. For a technical subject, Neal has produced some good examples and clear explanations for what he has done and shown. This book helped me sort out some memory issues, as well as prepare me for uploading my first App.