Learning iPhone programming

What Hacker News says

1. tgriesserNov 2010
   This has been a really good resource for me: Learning iPhone Programming: From Xcode to App Store

   http://www.amazon.com/Learning-iPhone-Programming-Xcode-Stor...

   Has some really good practical examples and does a good job explaining it.

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2. bk21Apr 2011
   In fact some books are good(+) and others are terrible(-). I recently have read a few O'Reilly books on iPhone programming.

   + Head First iPhone Development: The authors' penetrating and clear explanation is the reason why we pay for a book where there are very good and free documents. Fairly good book and I have recommended this book to all of my friends.

   - Learning iPhone Programming: Terrible. The author is fairly incompetent. He should have read Head First iPhone Development not to mention Apple's document in the first place.

   - iOS 4 Programming Cookbook: The most terrible book that I have ever read. The author is not even accustomed to C besides Objective-C. Who says procedure in C? Some explanation is completely wrong. Vandad also deleted the readers' errata. I have seen many erratas submitted and removed silently. Even if the errata was wrong this should never ever happen because other readers can also misunderstand that point.

   If O'Reilly have ever have a decent technical reviewers in mobile programming, they should have these books reviewed by them before these books published to the world.

   Finally O'Reilly should know that nowadays nobody refers to reviews in the oreilly.com. Many of the reviews are fake and blindly friendly.

   I hope to see much better ("worth the money") books from O'Reilly in the future.

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3. bjepsonApr 2011
   Your claim that the reviews are fake is untrue. These are genuine reviews. But if you don't believe me, I can't change that. I can change what ends up on the printed page, though. We want these books to be the best they can be, and if you want to help, here's how:

   Submit errata for the book when you find a mistake: For Learning iPhone Programming, it's http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/create/errata/?b=5073. For the Cookbook, it's http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/catalog/create/errata/?b=15595. We don't pay people for errata, but I'll make an offer to you and anyone else reading this: for every 10 new errata submissions of yours that we can confirm, I'll give you an O'Reilly ebook of your choice free.

   Be a tech reviewer on an upcoming book: We do pay a modest honorarium for this. You'd be reading the book, looking for mistakes and other issues. Contact me for details.

   To take me up on either offer, drop me an email at bjepson at oreilly. Act now, and I'll hook you up with an early access ebook for an upcoming book that I'm working on, Programming iOS 4: http://oreilly.com/catalog/0636920010258. I'd be interested in your opinion of that book.

   Thanks,

   Brian

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4. bk21Apr 2011
   Hi Brian,

   Thanks for great offer. It is a great honour to be a tech reviewer for O'Reilly. However, for some personal reason I can't accept your great offer. I believe you can find better tech reviewers than me.

   For erratas, - Learning iPhone Programming: It's almost been a year. I forgot the details. - iOS 4 Progg Cookbook: Vandad doesn't deserve any errata submission from readers. But I think anyone who have read some of Apple's document could easily find errors in the book. You said that book is for medium to advanced developers. I am just curious about how you measure the level of developers. He just made the clear cut documents hard to understand and even wrong sometimes. (Who says PROCEDURE in C world? Who on earth add frameworks to target not project? is application:didReceiveLocalNotification: method called when in background? Have you ever open anyone of the sample code projects in recent Xcode?)

   Thanks,

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5. heresyMay 2010
   I used to work on an OSS project I know a lot of you use, though it was in the bowels and not that sexy, don't want to overstate my contributions here.

   I enjoyed the community aspect of it immensely, but work and other things slowly chipped away at my available time until it got to the point where I was no longer able to maintain my level of contribution, and at the end of the day I'd end up collapsing and vegetating, programming being the last thing I wanted to do.

   Sanity has since returned, I'm working at a place that treats me well, and I have a decent balance of work to free time.

   I know I have the capability to make good contributions to an OSS project.

   I can hack C, pretty familiar with Ruby, Python, C#, etc. If I find some annoying bug on my Ubuntu box, I can and have tracked down what it is in the source, create a patch to fix it, and so on (used to be a Debian developer). I like to think I have a small amount of good taste, after several iterations of refactoring, though usually coming back after 6 months I think it's shit ;)

   I'm sort of casting about for a project...A problem I'm having is just starting something. Programmmer's block, if you will.

   I'm finding it tough going not having people to bounce ideas off or talk about tech with though. I actually think this is my biggest problem. I've been in the "wilderness" for the past 2-3 years.

   New Zealand is tiny, and rather Microsoft-centric, which unfortunately sometimes means not much of an interest outside of what Redmond provides.

   I like plumbing, infrastructure, networking, understanding how things fit together. Virtually everything interests me (perhaps that is a problem?).

   My reading queue, to give you an idea of my interests:

   * Beautiful Data

   * 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know

   * Learning iPhone Programming

   * Hello, Android

   * Programming Clojure

   * C# in Depth (when it's released)

   So, HN:

   Project Suggestions?

   Has anyone else returned from a sojourn in the wilderness?

   How did you do it?

   How did you get back into the thick of it?

   What got your juices going?

   Are you hiring? ;)

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6. nickcharltonMay 2010
   I was able to download the book I bought (The Book of Xen), after about 10 minutes.

   It's the second ebook I've gotten, first one "Learning iPhone Programming" came available instantly.

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