Programming iOS 7 Book Review

When I read the Programming iOS 5 version of this book about 2 years ago I started my review off with the paragraph below. 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. That was Thursday, April 12, 2012. In my opinion nothing has changed except for Microsoft being a little more lost, and I have floated towards iOS much more than Java (Android). This book is different than the Programming iOS 5 version. The Programming iOS 5 version has been broken into two books. This is the second book. The first is iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals: Objective-C, Xcode, and Cocoa Basics. If you are just getting started with iOS, I recommend reading iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals: Objective-C, Xcode, and Cocoa Basics first. This book is broken down into four parts. I have listed the topics covered in each part below. Part I 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 II 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 III 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 IV 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. There are 269 projects in the download. What I like about the samples that accompany this book is that they are in the context you would use them in. Some books don't do this and just run everything in main. That is fine for some code, but I find it very annoying when the discussion is about the UI. These examples don't do that and they provide more value. 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 7 developer, you owe it to yourself to buy this book and keep it at arm's length!!!

Programming iOS 7

Programming iOS 7