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.