Programming iOS 5 [Brossura]

iOS (iPhone OS) is Apple's unified operating system for its handheld/ mobile computing environments including the iPhone, iPad and the iPod touch. Matt Neuburg, the author of the O'Reilly "Programming iOS" series, has established himself as an expert in both the operating system and the large API set that supports it. His experience and authority shows throughout the book -- this is clearly somebody who's spent decades in his field and has some real, useful, hands-on experience to share. I learned iOS programming from this book's predecessor, "Programming iOS 4". Just about the time I finished reading that book, it was already out of date with Apple's iOS 5 having rolled out. Now that I'm finished reading this 1000+ page book, it, too, is out of date as Apple has announced iOS 6. I look forward to a new edition of Neuburg's book which I will pick up as soon as it becomes available.

Structurally, "Programming iOS 5" is similar to "Programming iOS 4". Both books are split into seven parts, but they really break down into three logical ones. The first section covers the Objective-C language that you must use to interface meaningfully with iOS. The second section covers the XCode IDE that virtually everybody uses to develop iOS programs, and the third, longest section of the book covers the actual iOS API set (he breaks this third section into five "parts" for publication symmetry, but these last five sections are far more related to one another than the first two).

Part I - Language

The first section is almost identical in both editions of the book. It's not a bad introduction to Objective-C; it starts with a refresher on the core C language (Objective-C can be seen as a competitor to C++ -- an object- oriented framework added to C). This chapter moves fast, so you'll probably want to have some prior exposure to C before picking up this book. The remaining four chapters of this section -- one-tenth of the book -- cover Objective-C. When I first picked up the first edition of this book, I had had no exposure whatsoever to the Objective-C language, but I was very comfortable with "regular" (procedural?) C. I found his coverage of Objective-C to be perfectly acceptable, albeit brief. I did have to refer back to these chapters a few times as I read later chapters to remind myself, for instance, what an Objective-C "Category" was, but the chapters are organized and indexed well enough that I could always find what I was looking for. From a learning perspective, it might have been nice if he had returned to some of the advanced concepts that a plain C programmer might not be familiar with when he talks about them from an iOS perspective, but it's not a terrible burden to go back and re-read the parts you didn't completely absorb when it comes back up.

I could summarize the differences between part I of the first and second editions in a few lines; Objective C itself didn't really change, so neither did the book. In fact, the only significant difference between the two books was coverage of ARC (Automatic Reference Counting), which is a new feature in iOS 5. Like I said, this whole section is comprehensive but brief; if you have time to invest in really learning Objective-C inside and out from another source before picking up this book, it will be time well spent. Still, I couldn't and didn't, and I don't think that my experience with the later chapters suffered as a result. The author has a tendency towards unnoted forward-references in this part, though -- he'll say "delete the setNumber: method and its declaration", but how to do that isn't covered until a few chapters later. If you're an experienced programmer, you can probably figure it out, but it might be hard going with a lot of turning back a few pages to re-absorb something.

Part II - IDE

The section on the XCode IDE is only four chapters, but they're amazing chapters. His coverage of the IDE is nearly exhaustive -- I now know what every single menu option and configuration screen in XCode is for. Although there are some obscurities he doesn't dig too deeply into, like the profiler, he shows you where they are and gives you a high-level overview of everything in there. This is where the author's experience shines -- he knows all the ins and outs and tips and tricks of the code/interface builder integration. He even shows three different ways of connecting interface builder objects to code. (One surprising omission is that he doesn't talk, at all, about how to use gesture recognizers in the NIB editor. He doesn't talk about that in chapter 18, on gesture recognizers, either -- so if you want to do this without code, you're sort of on your own).

This is a guide to using an IDE, though, so there are lots of screenshots in this part. There were a few places where the screenshots didn't match the screen, even though I was careful to ensure that I used the exact same version (4.3) that the author did. Still, these instances were few and far between, and in each case I was able to figure out how to do what the author was talking about anyway.

Part II ends out with a very good end-to-end look at Apple's appstore and the submissions process from start to finish. He talks about some decisions you can make early on (like providing a startup image) that will ease your pain when you get to appstore submission time -- this is great advice, and not something you're likely to be thinking about when you set out to write your first iOS app.

Part III - Cocoa

Cocoa is Apple's standardized UI framework. It grew from the NextStep/OpenStep programming environment that Steve Jobs headed up in between his times running Apple. Cocoa is actually not necessarily iOS specific, and you'll learn a handful of things in this section that are useful in the Mac OS/X programming environment. However, this book is specifically about iOS programming, so the four chapters that make up this section don't aim to be exhaustive -- the author shows you the parts of Cocoa that are important to iOS. Specifically, what Apple refers to as Cocoa Touch; their adaptation of the Cocoa framework to a touch-and-gesture based environment. This section is where I most often found myself having to thumb back to part I to remind myself how, say, "key-value coding" worked.
This section also had probably the biggest departure from the first edition in chapter 12 on memory management -- memory management changed completely between iOS 4 and iOS 5, so this chapter was rewritten in its entirety. He still does a good job of covering the "old" iOS 4 way, recognizing that there will be a lot of legacy programs out there for quite a while. However, outside of this chapter, all of the sample code assumes use of the new ARC memory management facility, so you'll probably want to pay very close attention to this chapter. Memory management is a big deal in iOS, and Neuburg does a great job of explaining exactly what your responsibilities are in that regard. The only thing that was sort of off-putting is that he keeps repeating the phrases "as it were" and "vanish in a puff of smoke" (the latter three times on a single page in one instance).

Part IV - Views
Part V - Interface

This is technically where the real iOS programming section starts. This part (and, really, the rest of the book) are iOS specific. This is about two-thirds of the book, and gets into some very specific detail. The discussion of, for example, layers and animation is a hundred times more accessible than any of Apple's own documentation on the subject. The author takes heavy advantage of the API here and always does things the "Apple way" rather than show you his own solutions to various problems. This is also where you see the second-biggest difference from the first edition of the book when he covers storyboards. I was happy to see that, rather than blindly drinking the Apple kool-aid, Neuburg accurately predicts that the storyboard functionality is most useful for beginners putting together toy apps, but will likely get in the way in any real-world scenario. Still, since all of Apple's demos draw heavily on storyboards and segues, you'll need to know how they work and how they relate back to other code -- this book does a good job of describing them while not relying on them.

This is also where you can really tell that this is a book about the iOS programming environment, and not just a book about writing cool iPhone apps. The TableView, which is really the workhorse of real-world iPhone apps, isn't presented until chapter 21. A "get started quick" book would probably have presented the Table View towards the beginning, but this book takes the time to lay the groundwork for really understanding it before showing it to you. The coverage is excellent, though, and by the time you get there, everything is tied together so that table views make intuitive sense. His explanation of why a modal view controller will overlay an entire tabbed view controller in chapter 19, for example, is the sort of thing you'd never figure out in ages from reading Apple's documentation.

Parts IV & V -- spanning twelve of the book's 40 chapters and almost half of its page count -- are really the meat of the book; he attempts to cover every facet of the UI infrastructure. The chapters are logically placed so that there are few forward references and everything seems to "build on" what came before it. In terms of organization, I can't imagine there's a better way to present the iOS API. My biggest complaint, though, is that the organization of the book makes it very hard to follow along. When he presents the compass view in chapter 16, for example, he does present the code to draw it... but doesn't ever tell you that this code needs to be inserted into a custom "setup" method, called from "layoutSublayers". In chapter 20, he tells you how to make a view zoomable, but forgets to remind you to implement UIScrollViewDelegate. This is all stuff you can infer correctly if you've read (and completely absorbed) the previous chapters, but it makes the book a bit harder to read. It's never made clear if he's showing you something that you'll need to reuse later, or if he's just demonstrating a technique for your edification. If you want to see a fully-worked-out example, you'll have to download the code samples from the companion site. The downloaded code is indexed by page number - of the print edition. Unfortunately, this doesn't match up with the digital edition, so you'll have to go through a hunt to find the corresponding code samples if you have a non-print edition.

Part VI - Some Frameworks
Part VII - Final Topics

The remaining 13 chapters -- about 250 pages worth -- are sort of a "catch-all" for topics that didn't fit in earlier chapters. Again, most of this is essentially unchanged from the previous edition. I got the sense from the chapters on audio, video, photo & calendar that the author didn't have a lot of hands-on experience with these APIs and was mostly presenting the same detail you'd get from the online documentation. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if you wanted to, say, replace the built-in calendar app, you'll need to do some further reading after finishing this book. The chapter on the maps API is better than the others in part VI -- I got the sense that the author was a lot more excited about this than the other topics. He also spends a lot of time on map samples in chapter 20 (Scroll Views).

The book is rounded out with some discussion on storage, networking, threads and undo. All of these chapters are introductory rather than comprehensive -- I was honestly hoping for a more thorough treatment of networking, but this book is very UI-focused (and at 1,000+ pages, he understandably had to cut something short).

All in all, I think this is a great book. The author's introduction to this second edition includes a rant about some of the negative feedback he's gotten on the first edition -- I agree that some of it isn't quite fair, since this book is very specifically geared towards making you, the reader, an expert on the iOS user interface APIs, with some lighter treatment of the peripheral topics. It's not a "learn iPhone programming in 21 days" book, and it's also not an Objective-C book. The only improvements I'd like to see in a future edition would be more cross-referencing of previous topics (e.g. when layers and key-value coding are presented in chapter 16, include a "see pg. 91 if you've forgotten how key-value coding works" link), and a better sense of how the code samples fit together. Still, if you've got some good professional programming experience and don't need a lot of hand-holding, this is a great book to learn iOS programming from.

This book is simply a new release of "Programming iOS 4'. It contains lots of new information you won't find in previous release - mostly related to most recent changes in iOS 5. One of these features are story boards. Basically, whenever story boards are applicable, you will read how to apply them. ARC related memory management is another new feature, and, it is well described here. If you haven't used it yet you will learn how to work with ARC in both situations - when you develop old application and want to migrate to ARC and how to work with ARC in applications developed from the scratch. New concepts like @autoreleasepool blocks, weak references, retain cycles are also explained. Sections related to notifications, startup process and life time have improved. Comparing to previous edition, section "Swamped by Events" was rewritten and redesigned. In my opinion it is now easier to follow and easier to understand. The same refers to view controllers related part. Basically, the book targets recent XCode release and iOS 5 and addresses some composition/content related drawbacks you can find in previous release. Big plus goes for mentioning Instruments. However, this section is way too short. It covers only simple use-cases. Still, it's better than nothing.

When it comes to drawbacks. In my opinion there are two frameworks that are missing - CoreData and SQLite. You won't find anything about these in here. I think that book would be much better if it covered database storage related aspects. At least at introductory level.

If you own "Programming iOS 4' already, I'd skip this "upgrade". In case you haven't developed for iOS yet, this one is really good introduction to iOS development.

A little background so you know what type of experience I have. I have been a Microsoft .NET architect and developer since the first beta release. Before that C, C++, ColdFusion, ASP, JavaScript and of course HTML. Being a .NET developer has many advantages, but the one major disadvantage we suffer has driven me to Java and Objective-C over the past year. That one disadvantage? Microsoft themselves. They come off as completely lost and have wreaked havoc on .NET developer community the past few years.

I have read several books on programming with Objective-C, but this is by far the most comprehensive and well put together. One book I would recommend to anyone coming from the .NET world is Migrating to iPhone and iPad for .NET Developers.

After advising the reader to brush up on their C by reading certain parts of C Programming Language, and then spending a chapter showing how C relates to Objective-C, the author has a really nice overview of Objective-C. The overview is Part I of the book and it is 5 chapters long. The chapters include Just Enough C, Object-Based Programming, Objective-C Objects and Messages, Objective-C Classes, and Objective-C Instances.

Part II IDE includes chapters on Anatomy of an Xcode Project, Nib Management, Documentation, and Life Cycle of a Project. In part II the author goes into detail about the architecture of the project and the files included in the project. He does a great job of explaining nibs, the coding environment, testing, debugging, and provides an overview of the steps taken when submitting your app to the app store. The author also points out and shows you how to take advantage of the Xcode documentation.

Part III is all about Cocoa. It includes chapters on Cocoa Classes, Cocoa Events, Accessors and Memory Management, and Data Communication. The author does a great job of explaining Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) in this section.

Part IV Views contains chapters on Views, Drawing, Layers, Animation, and Touches. This part is all about paths, clipping, gradients, colors, patterns, transforms, shadows, points, pixels, layers, sublayers, hierarchy, resizing, positioning, depth, borders, everything about animation, touch events, gestures, and hit-testing. In other words a ton of information about views is covered in this part.

Part V Interface includes chapters on View Controllers, Scroll Views, Table Views, Popovers and Split Views, Text, Web Views, Controls and Other Views, and Modal Dialogs. The understanding you gain of view controllers in this part of the book is amazing. The author did an awesome job explaining them and how they relate to rotation.

Part VI introduces some of the other Cocoa frameworks available including Audio, Video, Music Library, Photo Library and Image Capture, Address Book, Calendar, Mail, Maps, and Sensors.

Part VII is called Final Topics. In this part of the book the author introduces Persistent Storage, Basic Networking, Threads, Undo, and includes an Epilogue.

The downloadable code is very well organized and usable. It is broken down into folders by chapter and page number which makes it very convenient to find the sample you want.

This is by far one of the best programming books I have ever read. The author's approach and writing style made it a pleasure to read. He does a great job of explaining complex topics and always covers everything in depth.

If you are an iOS 5 developer, you owe it to yourself to buy this book and keep it at arms length!!!