Technology Base

I wouldn’t recommend this book if you wish to learn iPhone Game Development, they don’t even have a reference to sprites, they don’t run animations such as a walk cycle they show nothing of much use to 2D games unless they are games such as a tic tac toe or puck – i.e. where there are no animations just a solid state image bouncing about. The book is useful in other ways though so its not a complete loss, they do deal in detail with peer-to-peer networking etc such stuff which does belong in a game programming book and are very useful to know, so I wouldn’t recommend this book if you would like to know how to code games with animations involving sprites but it is useful to have to know about networking specific to games so I would recommend it from that viewpoint which is why it got 3 stars and not 1.
Rating: 3 / 5

I bought this book to get into game development on the iPhone. The direction and voice of the book glosses over details, picks random code snippets, and spends more time advising to check the code from the website. Speaking of just check [...], and you can save yourself the entire cost of the book. Maybe it gets better, don’t know yet, but so far the first third of the book is terrible.
Rating: 1 / 5

Spends way too much time on game development theory rather than the programming aspects. Starts up with Hello World and then later on to tic tac toe, and a whole chapter on “Novelty Apps” where the authors drone on about techniques for making a flame animate. In the middle of this 500 page book, they finally seem to start getting into some more advanced topics in their “Producing Action Games” chapter and again they waste pages talking about “The online markeplace”. As that chapter fades away and just begins to touch on useful game programming techniques for the iphone the authors veer away for the entire second half of the book in favor of a chapter on integrating with Facebook and another on “Understanding The Business of Software”. Even a hopeful chapter called “Grasping Advanced Programming Topics’ begins with exploring the camera! The last chapter is laughable, “31 Days of iPhone Apps”, where they show you 31 pages each with a screenshot and a simple description of an all-too-simple game they created. So the book was really less than 200 pages on game programming and their chosen games designs were far too simplistic to be of value for anyone hoping to learn to code a game that anyone would ever pay even 99 cents for. Also, I saw no mention of game engines such as Unity Pro or Torque or Cocos2d which many of the REAL iphone game developers out there are using and making money with. There’s just very little value offered here. Because of my opinion of this book, I have canceled my preorder of its sister book, “Cocoa Touch for iPhone OS 3″.
Rating: 2 / 5

…should be the title of this book, like other reviewers have indicated. Still, I found it to be most helpful in demonstrating how developers can exploit the iPhone’s tools to make more then just games. I would highly recommend this book as a companion to The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook: Building Applications with the iPhone 3.0 SDK (2nd Edition), which I also purchased recently. Now, if I can only get them both back from the hands of my developers!

I would also recommend this book as a primer to multi-touch system applications. As developers, we need to start getting our minds, as well as our hands, around the multi-touch computer interfaces.
Rating: 4 / 5

I’ve had this book a while and after actually reading the book – unlike others – I wanted to add my 2 cents worth. Looking at the other reviews, I realized the main problem with this book is that it has the WRONG title. It should have been titled to “Beginning iPhone Game Development.”

The books does great at getting you started. If you have an iPhone and just bought a Mac cause you want to start making iPhone Games – then this is a good book to start with. The author’s even recommend start small and get a $600 Mac mini – to keep cost down. Of course, that is a common theme in this book – just the minimums to get you started on the tools and development environment. You start with getting you familiar with Apple’s Developer Network and walks you through getting applications up and running on your iPhone. You even start with the obligatory “Hello World” app.

I must state that this book will not teach you how to write the next DOOM-Like 3d million dollar game for the iPhone. But you will learn to develop simple games on the iPhone that can be an attainable starting point for further research and development. There is also a lot of code resources on their site with great samples and resources.

If you have never programmed on a Mac or used Xcode/Objective-c on your Mac… then this book is a good place to get your feet wet in iPhone development. As a Windows Developer for years, Mac development if very different and Objective-C is a horrible language to just “pick up.” so, that made this book a great place to start. Of course, if you have been doing Apple Mac programming for years with XCode/Objective-C, then you might want to skip this book and look for something deeper – cause you are not a beginner. As I said, the title is what is wrong not the book itself. I would rate this book for Novice to Intermediate. I do not agree with the publishers listing of Intermediate to Advance.

Rating: 4 / 5