When I set out to write my own iPhone apps, I scoured Barnes & Noble and Borders looking for anything I could find. Since the iPhone’s inception nearly two years ago, publishers have been scurrying to get titles out the door. My goal of this article is to provide you with the tools necessary to help you with your iPhone app development.
Best books on the market
If you decide to go at it yourself and learn Objective-C, then I strongly recommend SAMS’s “Teach Yourself ” iPhone Application Development in 24 hours,” by John Ray and Sean Johnson. It’s extremely easy to follow and each chapter is devoted to teaching you progressively more difficult and cool projects. Of course with 24 hours in a day, there are a total of 24 chapters or projects that you will build. Each project comes with all the necessary files. What I like most about this book, is that it takes you through the process step by step. They even help you take the necessary steps of becoming an Apple iPhone developer as well as assisting you with creating a Development Provisioning File. The latter identifies the developer who may install an application, an ID for the application being developed, and the “unique devie identifiers” for each iPhone that will run the application. It’s one of the few books on the market that actually gives you exercises in the book to do and then test the projects as you read along. Each chapter has helpful commentary and is extremely well-written. Even the novice will find the text readable and he/she will gain confidence with each subsequent chapter. I felt extremely confident after the thirteenth chapter in writing my own apps. The examples are illustrated in four color and each chapter’s exercises are available to download for free at the Sams website. Although the book retails at $33, I’ve seen it offered for as low as $24 and I believe Amazon also offers an ebook at around $16. The publisher (Sams) has a slew of titles now associated with the “…in 24 hours” series of books. I believe it’s their way of competing with the “Dummy” series of books.
Speaking of which, the next book I recommend is by Neil Goldstein, “iPhone Application Development for Dummies.” It’s a good book with illustrations in black and white. The “Dummy” series is known for being well-written and easy for novices. Though all of the other books in this article aside from the one from SAMS, states that you’re better off if you have an Objective-C primer.
“The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook” by Erica Sadun came highly recommended. However, it’s one of the more difficult to grasp. The author is thorough and very technically inclined. However, I haven’t picked it up in quite some time.
Another book to check out is O’Reilly’s, “Head First iPhone Development” by Dan and Tracey Pilone. It’s written and illustrated in a fun and engaging way with retro photographs, jokes, and silly commentary. It’s called a “Brain-Friendly” book. It boasts that if you learn it through pictures, you’ll understand it better.
I also recommend the instructional learning site offered by Lynda.com. At $25/month, it’s quite reasonable as you have access to instructional videos of all of their software titles. The only shortfall for the site when it comes to iPhone application writing, is that they currently only offer one course. The instructor is thorough and interesting enough to listen to.
Apple provides gobs and gobs of resources to help you along the way as well as free samples of code that you can modify and use in your own apps. There are other ways you can create apps if you don’t want to learn Objective-C. That seems to be the biggest complaint that I’ve heard from novice programmers. Even seasoned programmers that haven’t worked with Objective-C have told me they would rather not learn it. I’ll talk more about the other ways you can get your app out there to sell in Part Two of this article.
Nick Nebelsky is President of Ideation at Intense Media, an idea development company. He is a certified Apple Developer and specializes in creating software apps and media for mobile devices such as the Apple iPhone and iPad. Nick’s background is in both electronic and traditional media, with a heavy emphasis on graphics. You can email him with story ideas at nick@intensemedia.com.
Posted on July 22, 2010
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