Mobile app development for phones, tablets, and similar devices is one of the most important areas in programming today. To make things difficult, every platform has its own programming systems, interfaces, and requirements. Naturally, each is more or less (usually more) incompatible with all the others. This, of course, also means that each platform has its own ecosystem of libraries, development kits, and documentation.

This book covers iOS 7 and Xcode 5 for iPhones and iPads. Probably some (much?) of it will work on earlier iOS versions, but I’m not sure about this.

There are 22 chapters, ranging from installation of the development kit to localization. Each of these takes the reader through the development of one or more small runnable apps. These are accompanied by friendly, chatty commentary. There are numerous images of interaction screens, as well as images of the resulting app. The sample code covers a good number of topics, and a few of the resulting source files are more than a couple hundred lines long, which makes them very good examples indeed.

The book presents lots of code, and the reader is encouraged to enter all of the code in the book in order to gain familiarity with the language and environment. Certainly entering code by hand is very effective in learning, though I think the payoff diminishes quickly as the amount of code increases. I’d probably just start with a running copy of the app and experiment by changing it. Happily enough, the code is available from the book’s website (http://www.apress.com/9781430260226/). The website also includes a forum for discussions of the book and code, and a place to list errata, which is quite a nice feature.

There seems to be a good variety of code presented, and a considerable selection of apps built. These touch on many of the kinds of things mobile device programmers will need to know.

While all of the code is written in Objective C, the language itself is not covered except where new features are discussed. Readers should be familiar with the language before trying to work through the code, or should have easy access to reference material.

This book would work well for someone with a basic background in programming and some familiarity with Objective C. I don’t know that I would recommend the book to anyone with long-term programming experience, but I might well recommend that someone with more experience download the code for samples, as it is generally quite well written. It would also be a difficult book to use in a classroom setting.

It does seem a bit redundant to print as much of the code in the book as is here, as most readers are likely to download the code and read it in Xcode. Certainly small snippets of code are worth including, but these long listings seem less than productive to me.