Most helpful customer reviews
50 of 54 people found the following review helpful.
A Good Start
By Gary K. Evans
I am a developer, but I know nothing about the iPhone or iPhone app development, so this book sounded perfect for me. It’s a very quick read: I read the whole book (< 160 pages) on a 3 hour flight to Boston. The prose is clear with very little fluff, but did I learn much about iPhone apps with HTML, CSS and Javascript? This raises the big question that was not clear to me when I started reading: who is this book for? It is clear that this book is not for someone who has no prior knowledge of HTML or CSS, or JavaScript. The tutelage on HTML and CSS is razor-thin. If you do not understand these languages, your head will swim very quickly. I have worked with both languages for a couple years, and yet I felt pretty unsatisfied with the skeletal explanations of some of the examples. The Javascript coverage was even more spartan. I am not a Javascript person; I know just enough to tweak simple code I have found on the Internet. I have no clue to some of the book's example code and what it means. Overall, I found this book was not written to be a tutorial at all. It is a bare introduction to the iPhone environment for a developer who has considerable experience in these languages. And to Stark's credit, he does does state in the Preface that this book is for people with "basic experience reading and writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (jQuery in particular)". I was not aware of this assumption, so be aware that you may have some rough going. On the up-side, however, there is some very interesting material in this book. I did learn something about the iPhone development environment, and the iPhone style of presentation. Now I know to look into Cocoa, jQuery and JQTouch. I also have to credit Stark for exactly limiting his presentation to provide a development option to Objective-C and submitting to the Apple Store. His last two chapters really interested me. Using PhoneGap to convert an iPhone web app to a native app was pretty thorough. Doing this conversion makes two distribution options available to the developer. And once your application is coverted, Stark's last chapter on "Submitting Your App to iTunes" really tied together some loose ends for me. Overall, I found this little book pretty helpful. It may not merit a second reading, but I have to offer it this praise: it has given me a foundation to start learning more detail, including writing in Objective-C.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful.
Saved me hundreds of dollars, tens of hours
By Seth C. Hayward
I have always used my iPod Touch religiously since the moment I got one. I’ve always wanted to build apps for it – but these were my obstacles:
(1) I don’t have Mac OS
(2) I can’t afford to invest hundreds of dollars into something I’m not sure is the right choice yet (Mac OS, Apple Developer program, books, etc)
(3) I build in VB.NET/ASP.NET, I use Visual Studio .NET. I curse them daily, but I like them.
(4) Have you heard what developers are saying about the App Store? It doesn’t sound very friendly. I built apps on Facebook before, it doesn’t feel that great to have a huge company telling you what you can and can’t do. It’s their right, of course, but an obstacle for me.
This book really surprised me – because it basically has the answers to the above obstacles. Namely, a web-based application approach. There are negatives, sure (I would say animation being the biggest one) – but the absolute beauty of this approach is that those negatives will eventually become less important over time. A big part of this approach is a reliance on open source jQuery plugins. Stark introduces these open source authors and projects succinctly and with full respect.
Before you go down the Objective-C route, give this book a shot. It made me seriously rethink a bunch of assumptions that I had made about an iPhone application. That alone was well worth price. Plus – look at what this book covers in the first few chapters, then compare that to the Objective-C/Cocoa books. This is a faster approach if you already have a web application in place.
On a side note, this books (with some tweaking) could make a good high school textbook. Teenagers today have a good grasp of HTML and CSS (see: Tumblr), and can be introduced to more advanced topics like jQuery and data storage if they see a benefit to actually learning it.
18 of 22 people found the following review helpful.
Gets around some of the ugliness of dealing with Objective-C
By calvinnme
As an IPhone app developer you’ve probably found that Objective-C is difficult to learn, rather counter-intuitive in syntax, and not very useful outside of the Mac programming world. Also, trying to get an app into the App store is like dealing with airport security – byzantine rules unevenly enforced and guaranteed long waits. Updates also take long time periods, and if your updates are in response to bugs you can quickly get a bad rep as a developer. This book shows you how to use commonly and long-used web technologies to build your application as a web app, have it tested on the web where you can quickly make changes in response to bugs, and then when you are ready, the book shows you how to use PhoneGap to convert your web app to a native iPhone app.
This book assumes that you have basic experience reading and writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, SQL, and jQuery. The author has a very brief overview of these technologies in the book, but it isn’t enough if you lack experience, and it is duplication of what you already know if you have experience. The book largely avoids the iPhone SDK but you will need access to a Mac for the material in Chapter 7 on PhoneGap. This is the chapter where the author shows you how to convert a web app into a native app that can be submitted to the App Store.
The book is short, but it is adequate and clearly written for the task at hand. I’d recommend it to anyone who is tired of dealing with Objective-C and is looking for an easier way to write and test IPhone apps.
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