Introduction

The very first book I read on Cocoa Programming was Cocoa(R) Programming for Mac(R) OS X (3rd Edition), and I wrote a review about that a while ago. Meanwhile I’ve been reading quite a few books on iPhone Programmings, and I even had the chance to met up with Aaron Hillegass at the NSConference. Meanwhile the folks at the Big Nerd Ranch released the iPhone Programming this new book which focuses on iPhone development. Since I learned a lot from the very first book, I decided to buy the iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides)
and read through it.

The book itself

Since reading my first Cocoa related book, I did learn a few things and started to learn some iPhone development. Most of the things I know is from stuff I read in books, on websites and by experimenting myself. The iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides) book itself is organized in a format which helps you learn the concepts and how things fit together. The book really helps you gather new knowledge and provides you with some techniques and sample source code which you can reuse in your own projects.

What I particularly loved in the book is that it follows some type of classroom format. For example, early in the book you will learn things about Delegation, Core Location, Views and start with a small project. Later on in the book, you will learn about the UINavigationController and use the same project to add the new things to it. This approach worked a lot better for me. Most other books teach you something with a small example, but this book uses a few sample applications throughout the whole book. The further you get in the book, the bigger the application gets and the more things you will use in it. I really LOVED that approach !

Conclusion

I have to say, I’ve been reading quite a few iPhone development related books. Most of them teach you a specific topic in a Chapter and then another topic in the next Chapter. The power of the iPhone Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides) is that it actually takes what you’ve learned in the first chapters of the book onto the next ones, allowing you to build on what you’ve learned so far.

The examples in the book are really worth it. Once you worked yourself through the book, you won’t have a set of 25 applications each showing one thing covered in the book. Instead you’ll have a set of 10 applications which combine everything you’ve learned and have enough sample code to get you going.

Additionally, the book contains quite a few challenges. Most of the time, there is more than one way to solve the challenges, so you won’t find any solutions in the book. This made me really think about the problem at hand, and not look to the solutions to see if I understand them. In case you have a problem with one of the challenges, or anything else in the book, the folks at the Big Nerd Ranch have set up a forum in which you can ask questions.

One thing to note though, is that the book was published before iOS 4 was released, so it doesn’t contain anything specific to iOS 4. Similarly the book does contain a chapter on Preparing for the iPad, but that chapter is limited. I really hope they will make a new book which focuses more on iOS 4 and iPad development as well. The forum has a few solutions to problems with iOS4 breaking some of the examples in the book, so go ahead and check those out as well.

All in all, a fantastic book for beginners and those of you who already did some iPhone programming as well.

Amazon Links

Just so you guys know … The links to the Amazon books in this article are Affiliate Links, meaning if you would buy the book by clicking on this link, a small percentage of the purchase prices will flow back to the Belgian Cocoaheads community.