iOS Apprentice book

[kary993]

I have competed the book and want to provide my basic review of the book and the experience going through the book.

First off, you did an excellent job of presenting very complex material, frameworks, language structures, and approaches to iOS development. I was skeptical at first about anyone’s ability to understand all of this if they did not have the advanced computer science background that I have. I do think for those that do not know object oriented structures, and MVC it might be a challenge for them, but it was presented very well in my opinion and for those with less experience this book is a fantastic place to begin learning these complex concepts.

The most striking aspect of this book for me were the approaches taken were not always the way the development might end up. While I know this from 30+ years of development experience, I have never seen anyone present material in this manner. Many if not most technical books provide the correct way to do it first and just explain here is how it done. The iOS Apprentice approach really ends up teaching so much more as the application approach evolves during the chapters show the reader many more aspects of the iOS and Switft. At first I found the direction changes a bit frustrating, probably because of my experience, but then realized fairly quickly that going through those iterations ended up teaching more about iOS and Swift either separately or simultaneously.

So, well done on this book as I am sure it took a huge amount of effort to write and review and get to market!

Next, I wanted to obtain some advice on some other good books around the framework of iOS. I find the apple documentation a bit lacking in understanding when the framework is firing certain methods at certain times. The apple documentation is good when you already know the fraemwork fairly well but I do not yet. iOS Apprentice has explained some, but of course there are so many others. If you had tried the book would have been 10,000 pages! As it is the last app is electronic anyway

Thanks again for a great book and the great support in answering questions on this forum as I went through the book! You guys are awesome!

Kary

[fahim]

Thank you for the kind words and the feedback

It’s always gratifying to know, as an author, that something you’ve written is appreciated by the reader. In fact, I was just talking about this with another author whose book I’d read and found to be extremely useful for what I was doing at the moment. Unfortunately, it is not about iOS development and so won’t be useful in answering your question about other books to try.

If you have not tried it yet, I would suggest trying the Swift Apprentice since it teaches a lot more Swift-specific concepts than iOS Apprentice does.

On the other hand, if you are not as concerned with the building blocks but want to know more about the frameworks involved in iOS development then you might either want to take a look at one (or more) of the iOS by Tutorial books since they concentrate on specific frameworks introduced/updated with each version of iOS.

Hope that helps but if not, feel free to let me know what you’re looking for more specifically and I’ll try to help.

[kary993]

Thank you for the suggestions. I think I will jump into the iOS 11 by tutorials and also the Swift Apprentice book just also build more knowledge in the language.

I have enjoyed iOS Apprentice so learning more about the building blocks and new features in iOS 11 will be fun, entertaining, and also educational. Would also like to get more into Core Data and Animations, but will wait on those once I build some more skill.

Thanks!