iOS 5 Essentials - Complete Guide for iPhone & iPad Users | Learn iOS 5 Features, Tips & Tricks for Work, Travel & Daily Life

Maybe the biggest attraction of this book is the simplicity of programming that it espouses. Daniel describes the iOS 5 Software Development Kit, in enough detail so that you can quickly do real coding. Yet he deliberately only touches on the main options you are likely to avail yourself of in the SDK.Handy is the iOS simulator, which unsurprisingly runs on a desktop or laptop Apple. It lets you write and test code with assurance under the overall familiarity of the main Apple OS. So that you don't have to continually download code from your main machine to an actual iPhone for testing. Speeds up your development cycle.The book starts with a chapter on implementing what it calls Newsstand. Where you make an app that draws together magazine subscriptions into an impressive networking display. It is this ease of writing networking applications that is a central theme of the book. The iPhone's strength derives in no small way from an intensive use of networking.Also encouraging for your graphics is the ability to code in OpenGL. While mostly used on larger machines, Daniels demonstrates how this has now been ported to the iPhone platform. If you have already coded in OpenGL elsewhere, the chapter on how to use it on the iPhone is a beaut way to leverage your experience. The examples show rendering manipulations of 3d objects that the iPhone is perfectly capable of performing. You even get a choice of 2 shaders.Of necessity, the text cannot go into prolonged examples. But the chapter on storyboarding shows how to do a top down design of an intricate game or other type of application. Veteran programmers will appreciate how this can segue into the lower level steps of coding.