Introducing Bands

When I was approached to write a book for the beginner’s series from Wrox, I decided I wanted to take a different approach then any of the other beginning iOS books I had bought.  I’ve written software in many languages and never found a beginners book that suited me. Instead I learned by creating something I could use. I decided to take that approach for the book.

“Beginning iOS Development – Building and Deploying iOS Applications” is now written, through edits and off to production. I believe it will be available in late January or early February.

The app the book builds is called Bands. It’s a simple app that would never win an Apple Design Award but instead walks readers through first step things like wiring up an IBAction to a button to advanced topics like using NSURLSession and completion handler blocks against the iTunes Search API.

The chapter I’m most proud of is Chapter 2 “Introduction to Objective-C.” The book is aimed at devs who have written Java or C#. This chapter teaches Objective-C by comparing things like classes, methods and properties to similar code written in Java and C#. It also covers Manual Reference Counting, Automatic Reference Counting and Model-View-Controller. It’s the chapter (and honestly the book) I wish I had in 2008 when I started writing iOS apps.

Its been exhausting. The worthwhile experiences often are.

I hope readers learn as much reading this book as I learned writing it.