I haven’t had time to read much of the book. So instead of a book review, this is more of an FYI.

I was interested in the book for the following reasons:

• Apress did a great job with Beginning iPhone Development and iPhone Games Projects
• There’s a chapter that covers cocos2d and the Chipmunk physics engine
• Neil Mix – who wrote Pandora Radio for the iPhone – has a chapter on audio streaming
• There’s a chapter on multi-threading
• There’s another chapter on writing a game

As always, Apress goes for quality over quantity.  If you like your books by the pound, you may be disappointed to find that the book only has seven chapters.  But it looks to me like there is a wealth of information in it.

You can find the eBook here:

http://apress.com/book/view/1430224592

One of the authors — Jeff LaMarche – has started on online tutorial in his blog for OpenGL ES programming. You can find the Table of Contents here:

http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2009/05/opengl-es-from-ground-up-table-of.html

The book came out the same month OS 3.0 came out. So it won’t have the latest info. But there is still plenty of info and code that will probably still work in the new operating system and on the new hardware.

The first chapter contains no code and is about the fine art of simplicity. It is written by Joachim Bondo – the man behind the Deep Green chess app. I keep running into people who try to stuff complex desktop apps on to the iPhone. They and everyone else need to read this chapter.

The next chapter is by PJ Cabrera. I didn’t even know that the Mac could do Rails programming by default. Within five minutes of his instructions I used Rails to get a test server running on my Mac Book Pro. This was so I could use it to test his code on REST-based Web Services.

Aaron “Flick Fishing” Fothergill wrote the next chapter titled “Rapid Game Development Using (Mostly) Standard C” He discusses code he hacked from the iPhone Crash Landing app to whip up a 2D demo game in (mostly) C. I may review his mods to build a better Sprite class.

Brian “Enigmo” Greenstone writes about game optimization, discussing compiler settings, texture compression, graphics and audio optimization, performance tools, etc.  This chapter contains a lot of useful advice – don’t skip it!

Olivier Hennessy and Clayton Kane of Posimotion (Bikini Hunt) discuss game design, including selecting an engine and documentation.

Michael Kasprzak discusses portable code, game loops, event management, and frame skipping.  I’ll have to re-read his chapter again and work his ideas into a revised OpenGL ES template.

Mike “Tap Tap” Lee discusses graphics and animation and using Shark to find bottlenecks in your code.

Finally Richard Zito and Matthew Aitken discuss Bonjour Networking and Socket Programming. I see a lot complaints in iTunes that people want to be able to network their games. If you can master that it could be a selling feature.  Bonjour lets you network among friends on a LAN without needing a central server.  For the latest technology you should also check out the Apple guide to the Game Kit.

If you’ve been counting you figured out there are only eight chapters. I am glad to see that some publishers are going for quality over quantity. There’s more than enough info in this book to make it worth your while.

The book covers all the important basics and shows you how to build an iPhone UI and wire up the buttons, etc. In fact it’s the book I used to figure out how to write the touch handlers in the previous example. Besides basic interaction (taps, touches, gestures), the book also covers what’s known in the iPhone as “views” (think of them as pages of your application). It also covers things like how to design for rotation, acceleration, location, table views, tab bars, pickers, etc. It even covers the basics of using SQLite3 to save data locally.

Once you are done reading the book, you may realize just how simple it is to recreate many of the apps that you see in the App Store and in the Apple commercials using ready made components supplied by the iPhone SDK.

Even if you decide to just build an OpenGL ES app – you will probably still end up using views to create opening and configuration screens for your app. So no matter what approach you take to developing iPhone apps, you will probably find the information in this book essential.

Besides Amazon – you can buy a PDF version of the book here: http://www.apress.com/book/view/1430216263

Since the book is heavy in Objective-C code, you may also want to pick yourself up a copy of Programming in Objective-C 2.0 (2nd Edition) (Developer’s Library).