Ask HN: iPhone Development Resources

4 points by dlytle 17y ago ↗ HN

I've got a couple of applications I plan to build for the iPhone. (I mainly plan to use them myself; diet/caffeine tracker and the like.)

However, I don't know of any good resources available for iPhone development. All the books I've found deal with Jailbroken iPhones, not the newer 3G. Can anyone here recommend some sites, or even better, some print books that will still be relevant in the 3G world?

Thanks for your time!

2 comments

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watmough 17y ago ↗

I've been very impressed with the Apple documentation in the SDK. The included applications cover a lot of ground in the UI, and thanks to the speed of the development tools, it's easy to code and learn a step at a time.

I've had a fun few hours this afternoon building a very simple image processing app that uses custom table view cells as a way to show each step of the process.

The foregoing said, there are other materials coming out, but I believe that the NDA surrounding the SDK is holding these up.

demallien 17y ago ↗

There are no books available yet for the iPhone SDK, as it is still under NDA (why, I have no idea!)

That said, when you download the SDK, you receive a lot of good documentation direct from Apple - tutorials, programming guides, API references etc. It's a bit more work then just picking up a book, but it's not bad.

There is probably one book from the Mac world that is worth looking at - I forget the title, but it's written by Aaron Hillegass - everyone just calls it the Hillegass book... The first half of that book just teaches you basic Cocoa patterns, that are every bit as applicable in the iPhone world as they are in the Mac world. Once you have got those basics nailed down, the Apple documentation does become a bit easier to use.