Matt Neuburg - iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals: Objective-C, Xcode, and Cocoa Basics

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After three editions of my book on programming iOS Programming iOS 4 (May 2011), Programming iOS 5 (March 2012), and Programming iOS 6 (March 2013) it is as if a friendly but powerful giant had ripped the book in two, just after the end of Part III (Chapter 13). There are now two books:

The giant was friendly, because it was high time. Programming iOS 6 had grown to an unwieldy and forbidding 1150 pages. In fact, I had been begging for this giant even before Programming iOS 4 was published indeed, before it was even conceived of. My original proposal to OReilly Media, back in early 2010, had been for a book to be called Fundamentals of Cocoa Programming , intended to cover very much the same material as the present book, iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals . But the proposal was accepted only on condition that it be extended to cover much more of Cocoa Touch (iOS) programming; so I complied and set to work on this longer project, and later, despite my impassioned pleas in the autumn of 2010, I was unable to persuade the publisher to break up the lengthy manuscript into two: by that time, all the kings horses and all the kings men could no longer crack Humpty Dumpty apart.

The new situation, therefore, is just what I always wanted in the first place but not quite, because what I most desired was a single book in two volumes. My idea was that the books would have the same title, distinguished as Volume I and Volume II, with successive numbering of pages and chapters: if Volume I ended, say, with Chapter 13 and page 400, then Volume II would start with Chapter 14 and page 401. To this delightfully Victorian extreme, Im sorry to say, OReilly Media were implacably opposed.

Thus, Programming iOS 7 , though it starts with its own Chapter 1 and page 1, nevertheless still picks up exactly where iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals leaves off. They complement and supplement one another. Those who desire a complete grounding in the knowledge needed to begin writing iOS apps with a solid and rigorous understanding of what they are doing and where they are heading will, I hope, obtain both books. At the same time, the two-book architecture should, I believe, render the size and scope of each book individually more acceptable and attractive to more readers.

Those who feel that they know already all there is to know about C, Objective-C, Xcode, and the linguistic and architectural basis of the Cocoa framework, or who are content to pick up such underpinnings as they go along, need no longer (as some in the past have done) complain that the book is occupied with 13 preliminary chapters before the reader starts really writing any significant iOS code, because those 13 chapters have now been abstracted into a separate volume, iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals , and the other book, Programming iOS 7 , now begins, like Homers Iliad , in the middle of the story, with the reader jumping with all four feet into views and view controllers, and with a knowledge of the language and the Xcode IDE already presupposed. And if such a reader subsequently changes his or her mind and decides that a thorough grounding in those underpinnings might in fact be desirable, iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals will still be available and awaiting study.

As for this book, iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals itself, it is the prodigal child, the book I originally wanted to write but which was then subsumed during three editions into the larger world of Programming iOS 4 , Programming iOS 5 , and Programming iOS 6 . Now it is home again, where it belongs, in a volume of its own. Its three parts teach the underlying basis of all iOS programming:

The reader of this book will thus get a thorough grounding in the fundamental knowledge and techniques that any good iOS programmer needs. The book itself doesnt show how to write any particularly interesting iOS apps (though it is backed by dozens of example projects that you can download from my GitHub site, http://github.com/mattneub/Programming-iOS-Book-Examples), but it does constantly use my own real apps and real programming situations to illustrate and motivate its explanations. And then youll be ready for Programming iOS 7 , of course!