iPhone SDK Development (The Pragmatic Programmers)

This book is pretty good, it starts off great, really great. But very quickly the book starts to goes off the rails. General example. You're following along the text, and with detective work you've filled in may small gaps which they don't mention. You notice they didn't mention something in the worst way possible. You have to find out by looking at the function they mention in the text, and seeing which instance variables they have in it that you were never told to create. It's not that they're saying, next we made some XIB files and tied them to UIViewControlers named X, Y. I mean they literally start referencing custom classes they never mentioned before, in a function they paste into the books text. Let me give you a concrete example: CoreData chapter, you're going along and filling in the gaps. Then you get to the Navigation subsection of CoreData, and all of a sudden they're referencing not one but TWO new UIViewControllers ( complete with custom XIB files! ), that they never mentioned before. How do you find out about it? Well it's in the function you're typing into your editor as you read the book. No mention what so ever! -- They refer to the downloadable source files for the sections of code, however those xcode projects are basically complete versions. So when you read it, you can't tell what you're supposed to have by now that they didn't mention, and what comes later that you should not copy. Good book with decent info, but i think they ran out of paper and users are left to guess their way thru instead of being able to focus on the lessons.