I picked up this book to read about Objective-C, the primary language used to build applications for the iPhone operating system (OS). The book comes with an extremely helpful DVD that contains Kochan’s illustrative tutorials. The videos help professionals gain control over this new language fairly quickly and provide a guided tour for beginners.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which is organized in three parts. Part 1, “Introduction to the Language,” covers the basic constructs of a language: data types, loops, conditionals, classes, inheritance, type binding, and preprocessing. Someone who is already familiar with an object-oriented programming language such as C++ or Java will only need to skim this part. Knowing C would be very helpful in learning Objective-C. But even if you have never programmed in C, don’t worry--the author has you covered. The book is written in a way that makes the information easy for novices to learn. The hands-on programming exercises provided in the book and illustrated in the videos in an actual Xcode development environment are extremely helpful for getting to know the language closely.

In Part 2, the author covers the foundation framework, which is quite important for being able to build real-life applications based on the ones in the textbook. As an experienced programmer, I found this part more appealing than the first.

Part 3 was my favorite. It provides a good introduction to the Cocoa framework and to building iPhone applications. It provides a very good foundation for understanding how to build iPhone applications. The author provides a sample application for illustration that readers can build and run on the simulator or the actual device.

Overall, this is a very good book for learning about the language. However, readers should not expect to be able to build nice, cool iPhone applications just from reading this book. It should be thought of as a very strong foundation that will lead readers to pick up more advanced application-oriented books.

In conclusion, the easy-to-understand narration in both the book and the accompanying videos makes this book a very good read and a must-have for those interested in iPhone application development.