When we wrote the first edition of iPhone SDK Development, we knew we
weren’t writing something like The C Programming Language that would live
on unchanged for decades. But was two years on the shelf too much to ask
for?
Apparently so! And we’re not complaining. Since the release of our first book
in early 2009, the platform has surged in popularity and prominence. In the
intervening years, the platform has added a whole new device family in the
iPad, sold millions of units, and changed its name from iPhone OS to iOS to
better reflect its multiple uses and perhaps to leave the door open to future
devices.
The SDK has also grown in breadth and depth, adding new features, new
frameworks, and new tools. Since the first book, Apple has changed compilers
and has radically overhauled Xcode, the primary iOS development environment.
As we did our day-to-day work with all this new stuff, we’d sometimes
look over the book and notice each time that more and more of it was out-ofdate.
The Xcode screenshots, the callbacks to selectors instead of blocks, the
exposure of private variables and method names in the public header—all
this stuff we weren’t using ourselves anymore—it all seemed so…so 2009.
Welcome to the new state of the art development for iOS, with the radically overhauled Xcode 4 toolchain and iOS 5 SDK. With this book you'll accelerate your development for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. You will learn the new tools like Storyboards, practice on new APIs like the Twitter framework and use the latest features of the Objective-C 2.0 programming language.
Since the iPhone's launch in 2008, the iOS platform has added two new device families, thousands of new APIs, new tools and programming practices, and hundreds of thousands of new apps. iOS SDK Development is the second edition of the bestselling iPhone SDK Development, completely rewritten from the ground up to cover iOS 5's new features.
You'll get hands-on experience working with Objective-C and Xcode 4 as you work through this tutorial-style book with two experienced iOS developers by your side. Along the way, you'll learn the fundamentals of maintainable, performant iOS programming, including:
Making apps that are multi-core-capable, testable, internationalizable, and that use less memory.
Understanding the underlying concepts of touch event handling, drawing and animation, multi-core concurrency, and memory management with iOS 5's new Automatic Reference Counting.
Creating and using unit tests to ensure your app continues to work as intended even as the codebase evolves.
Working through Apple's App Store processes, including preparing apps for submission, avoiding rejections, and understanding crash reports from end users.
Whether you're a first-time iOS developer, or you're looking to get up to speed with all the changes to Apple's tools and frameworks, iPhone SDK Development is the solid grounding you need to master this popular platform.
What You Need:
You need a Mac running Mac OS X Lion (10.7) and Xcode 4.