Barcodes with iOS: Bringing together the digital and physical worlds

What? No Swift?

Let me start by saying one of the most informative books I've read in a long time. The preface fully intrigued me and had me yearning to learn more about the different types of barcodes and how to utilize them best. This book gives you all the background you need and more!The author takes you through a plethora of valuable resources on many different types of barcodes both supported and unsupported by iOS with a detailed but not overly done history on how they were created. The examples with different types and how they grew over the years fully engage the reader into the past and current state of barcodes and where they're currently used in todays world.Examples are usable in the real world and keep the reader engaged with how best to utilize each type of barcode. Not only does the author give you information on what is natively supported on iOS but he also supplies you very generously with real world API's that aren't natively available. The API's he supplies are free to utilize in your own applications without charge, very generous. The examples cover scanning, reading and even how to print barcodes onto labels for your own personal use. I fully enjoyed the ones dealing with geolocation and it brought ideas to my mind that I may not have thought of otherwise.The geolocation section takes you through an example that not only takes the user through how to set it up but it also explains each step along the way, super helpful in understanding how to ensure that battery power was saved on the device and minimizing usage. After geolocation it continues on to show how a group of people could offer information for the application and provide more details using barcodes in the scope of yard sales. The products they offer are broken into different tables and demonstrates how iBeacon's could be useful (software is provided to use as an iBeacon hardware substitute). With iBeacon's he demonstrates how you can provide refined location data on distance from one to the other and provide a better context of where the person is standing in reference to the tables. Using the context supplied with iBeacons allows you to enhance the information supplied for the products the person is most likely looking at currently. One of many great examples!I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have, it provides a plethora of examples and information that I haven't come across in the past, dealing with barcodes can be a daunting task and this book helps to bring them into a much clearer light.

If you think this book is only for barcode nutters, think again. The great thing about this book is that it uses barcodes to introduce a wide range of iOS technologies. The many elaborate examples it includes go well beyond the usual tiny snippets of code that come with other books. The time Oliver invested in tinkering with AV Foundation, the camera, Passbook, generating and validating passes, AirPrint, Core Image, NSURLSession, Core Location, JSON, RESTful web APIs, beacons, Core Data and OAuth, will give you a head start and save you valuable time. Time you get to spend on developing your app. Oliver's many years of experience programming for iOS is also evident throughout the book. And as a bonus you get BarCodeKit enabling you to generate various types of barcodes on iOS and OS X. I highly recommend this book. Also make sure to check out Oliver's blog.

When I first heard about this book I was really looking forward to getting my hands on it. Now that I have it, I can see that Oliver did an excellent job making it. It is very well written with lots of great information about barcodes. The release of this book couldn't have been better timing for me. I am a developer myself and I used the information in this book along with the excellent code samples to add barcode printing support to my Mac app. As a developer, all I can say is you should get this book. Barcodes are everywhere and this book makes it simple to understand the wide variety of different code formats available. And the code samples provided for both scanning and printing of barcodes will literally save you hundreds of hours of development time. What more can you ask? Buy it now.

Oliver's writing is easy to read and understand. I've followed his blog, Cocoanetics, for years. When I heard he was writing a book about Barcodes, I immediately decided to pick it up. Barcodes are confusing because there are many variants and it's not obvious, at first glance, how one might consume or generate them. Prior to iOS 7, there was one popular barcode library that was difficult to use. iOS 7 supports a limited set of barcode functionality, which is great but it isn't a guide. Barcodes for iOS is a wonderful guide that explains barcode scanning, generation, and even goes into iBeacon functionality. I highly recommend picking up this book!.

I think it is is a great book! And I am not just saying that because I am the author. ;-)Over the course of 15 months this book started out as an idea and got polished in the one and only such reference for serious iOS developers. Everywhere you see a barcode there is an opportunity for an app. I wrote this book to give you all you need to make these new kind of app that was not feasible before.

A lot of content depends on the author/teacher itself, how to present it and make it easy for the reader to digest it. Oliver is the best at doing that, he explains things in a excellent way. Finished the book and have really learned a lot, not just Barcode stuff, but iOS techniques as well. The book has pictures to really help guide you along with the coding exercises. I would recommend this book to anyone, you should definitely buy this book.

I purchased the book so that it would help us with adding barcode support to our STV framework. I found the book to have incredible depth on the subject of barcode development. The writing style is also very clear and interesting, with lots of examples. I would highly recommend this to anyone interested on learning more about iOS and barcodes.