Subscriber Reviews

Average Rating:  Based on 11 Ratings

"Not enough iPhone-specifics" - by Pegazyz on 02-DEC-2009
Reviewer Rating:
I was vastly disappointed with this book, mainly because they spent so much time explaining generic multimedia and game development concepts, such as game anatomy, pixels, sprites, 3D models, frame-by-frame vs. keyframe animation, particle systems, etc, none of them into enough details to be worth it (sometimes just a paragraph for such vast topics), yet taking up much of the space in the book.

I was also expecting more information about deploying to the AppStore and the gotchas involved there.

Just be aware that if you are already familiar with game development you might feel like wasting much time on things you already know and very little time on the iPhone-specifics you want to learn about.

Yet, if you are totally new to game development in general (but already good at programming), that book might serve as an introduction to it, in the context of the iPhone.

The authors go to great lengths to teach Objective-C, while I think it deserves its own book.  For learning Objective-C I would rather recommend the free PDFs provided online by Apple, as well as the book "Programming Objective-C 2.0" by Stephen G. Kochan.

For 2D games, instead of reinventing the wheel like in this book, I recommend looking into the open-source Cocos 2D framework, which handles much of the graphics and audio intricacies.

For 3D games, look into Unity 3D, for which there is now a free version for independent developers.

Also visit Apple's iPhone development portal (free):
http://developer.apple.com/iphone/

I strongly recommend also subscribing to the iPhone Developer Program (100$) for even more online resources.  You will have to at some point anyway, in order to deploy to the real device.

Happy iPhone development!
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