iOS 7 Programming Cookbook Book Review

This is a massive cookbook with tons of recipes. It covers a ton of material and it covers it in depth. Although this book is more of a reference than a cover to cover read, every time I use it to look something up I find myself getting sucked in and reading several topics, and sometimes several chapters. In the preface the author says this version of the book is a complete remake, not an update, and I have to agree with him. The first chapter used to be The Basics and it is gone. This edition of the book is not for novice programmers to get started with Objective-C and iOS programmer. The author also warns the reader that this is for the experienced developer. I really like this new version. It adds chapters on Creating Dynamic and Interactive User Interfaces, Building Complex Layouts with Collection Views, Notifications, and Security. The chapter's recipes topics are reflected in the titles of the chapters. I have listed them all below. 1. Implementing Controllers and Views 2. Creating Dynamic and Interactive User Interfaces 3. Auto Layout and the Visual Format Language 4. Constructing and Using Table Views 5. Building Complex Layouts with Collection Views 6. Storyboards 7. Concurrency 8. Security 9. Core Location and Maps 10. Implementing Gesture Recognizers 11. Networking, JSON, XML, and Sharing 12. Audio and Video 13. Address Book 14. Files and Folder Management 15. Camera and the Photo Library 16. Multitasking 17. Notifications 18. Core Data 19. Dates, Calendars, and Events 20. Graphics and Animations 21. Core Motion 22. iCloud 23. Pass Kit Each chapter begins with a short introduction to the topic that will be covered by the recipes, and each recipe has a Problem, Solution, and Discussion section. Chapter 1 is one of my favorite chapter. It is 167 pages long and covers a ton of the controls and views in iOS 7. It is really nice to see a full example dedicated to each one of the controls. So far I have used this book to figure out how to add maps and getting directions to my application, make use of the NSURLConnection, get started with Core Data, get static JSON data out of the application's bundle, deserialize JSON into dictionaries, and make use of the address book, camera, and photo library. The downloadable code is awesome. It is very well organized and is very usable. It all just runs, which is great. I have had a few books recently where that was not the case. The only thing I would have liked to see is a chapter dedicated to the new iOS 7 Sprite Kit. I don't know how much value add that would be since it is a pretty big topic, so I won't ding the book for it not being mentioned and hope for it to be added in the future. Like the previous two versions, this book will stay by my side until the next version of it becomes available. I am constantly reaching for it. Any serious iOS 7 developer owes it to themselves to pick up a copy of this book.

iOS 7 Programming Cookbook

iOS 7 Programming Cookbook