Alasdair Allan - Learning iOS Programming: From Xcode to App Store

Heres a short summary of the chapters in this book and what youll find inside:

This chapter discusses the need for native applications and compares building native applications to building web applications.

This chapter walks you through the process of registering as an iOS developer and setting up your work environment, from installing Xcode and the iOS SDK to generating the developer certificates youll need to build your applications and deploy them onto your own iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

This chapter allows you to get hands-on as quickly as possible and walks you through building your first Hello World application, including how to deploy and run the application on your iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad.

This chapter provides a crash course in the basics of the Objective-C language, and if youre familiar with another C-derived language (and perhaps with object-oriented programming), it should be enough to get you up and running with Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch frameworks.

The UITableView and associated classes are perhaps the most commonly used classes when building user interfaces for iOS applications. Due to the nature of the applications, these classes can be used to solve a large cross section of problems, and as a result, they appear almost everywhere. In this chapter, we dive fairly deeply into the table view classes.

After discussing the table view controller in detail, we discuss some of the other view controllers and classes that will become useful when building your applications: simple two-screen views, single-screen tabbed views, modal view controllers, and a view controller for selecting video and images.

This chapter discusses connecting to the Internet, browsing the Web, sending email, and retrieving information.

This chapter discusses how to handle data input, both from the application user and programmatically, and how to parse XML and JSON documents. The chapter also covers storing data in flat files and storing data with the SQLite database engine.

This chapter discusses how to determine what hardware is available and illustrates how to deal with the major sensors on iOS devices: the accelerometer, magnetometer, camera, and GPS.

This chapter walks you through the process of building applications that make use of the Core Location and MapKit frameworks.

This chapter provides a brief introduction to integrating Apples iCloud service into your own applications. iCloud is a service that helps you synchronize your data across devices, making documents and data available to all of your subscribed devices.

This chapter shows you some of the tricks to integrate your application with iOSs software ecosystem, how to present user preferences with Settings Bundles, and how to use custom URL schemes to launch your application. It also discusses how to make use of the Media Player and Address Book.

This chapter talks about how to add some final polish to your application and walks you through the process of building your application for distribution, either via ad hoc distribution or for the App Store.

This chapter provides a collection of pointers to more advanced material on the topics we covered in the book, as well as material covering some of those topics that we didnt manage to talk about in the book.

The following typographical conventions are used in this book: