iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides)

After reading the couple of reviews available about this book, I was hesitant, but glad I made the purchase.I've been through it once already doing the exercises and it is clearly set out and understandable. It covers most of the key topics, and while you wont be a great developer straight up, you will have a great start.The only point I found was that some of the coding was not up to date with the later version of Swift/xcode, but the IDE will tell you what to fix. They also have a number of challenges in the book that are a little light on direction - for someone who has done development before (as I have), you will find the answers, but for someone new, they could be a bit daunting and put a reader off early in the book.I would certainly recommend this book, and they would be my first point of reference for other trainings.Great job!

This book is like an Xcode & Swift apperitive, it feeds you for a few hours but then you realise you need a proper meal. It should be called "very limited iOS Cookbook in swift" because that's what it is.It lacks:A chapter in networkingA chapter in App storeA chapter in creating a developer account.Loads of explanations.A chapter in Push notificacions.I feel I've been scammed its cost.

This book is returned, as I am not aware of that now using swift in the latest version. I give 5 star just because the previous book Objective C is a good one. 5 star is Not a reference on this version. It is better to be aware that new version change from Objective C to Swift.

Spedizione puntualissima come sempre. Il libro è scritto in un inglese molto chiaro e per niente difficile da capire. L'approccio essenzialmente pratico ne facilita anche la memorizzazione. Consigliatissimo

Je ne connaissais pas du tout les livres Big Nerd Ranch avant celui-ci et je dois dire qu’ils sont parfait pour apprendre la programmation dans un nouveau langage. J’en fais une collection tellement je suis fan ! Je ne peux plus m’en passer ;-)Distribue par Pearson, le livre se divise en plusieurs chapitres amenant progressivement le lecteurs vers toutes les notions iOS. Je trouve le livre très didactique avec notamment les sections de fin de chapitre appelées « Challenges ». A ce moment vous seul devrez vous débrouiller pour arriver a terminer ces exercices car aucune solution n’est donnée dans le livre. Vous devrez donc vous faire aider par une communauté de programmeurs sur les forums officiels. Je trouve ce concept tout simplement excellent. Quoi de mieux que de mettre en oeuvre les bases par soi-même ? ;-)Je tiens a mentionner également les maisons d’edition Eyrolles et Pearson qui font un travail remarquable et dont les livres sont les meilleurs pour apprendre la programmation en français.Enfin, les livres O’Reilly, avec lesquels j’ai débuté et avec lesquels je continue d’étudier encore aujourd’hui (édités désormais uniquement en anglais) sont parfaits pour se perfectionner.

La mejor serie de libros para aprender iOS

ils sont parfait pour apprendre la programmation dans un nouveau langage.

All you need to know is object oriented programming. If you get stuck, you get help in the forum of the book, where the author also answers the questions.

Pretty good for beginners

Les livres de Big Nerd Ranch sont vraiment bien écrits et très concisJ ai beaucoup apprécié ce livre et pu apprendre des choses très intéressantes

Classic Book! Must have it if you want to become ios Developer

This book is exactly what I was looking for. I'm relatively new to swift but I also have a decent grasp of object oriented programming, so in my case, I wasn't looking for a top to bottom explanation of how programming works (If you ARE new to programming, then I'd go with the Swift Programming book by Big Nerd Ranch). What I needed was something that would present the important iOS concepts and briefly glaze over some of the nuances of swift. This book does just that.The authors clearly know how to teach this subject because the material flows very naturally. They slowly introduce the reader to different aspects of iOS development, that you never feel confused or overwhelmed. In addition, everything is articulated and explained really well. I've tried a few other resources - following tutorials and listening to lectures online but nothing has felt nearly as effective as this. Partly because the book does a good job of maintaining a balance of teaching you new ideas while also having you apply them first hand. This method of learning is generally much more engaging since you're presented with concepts as you need them while building apps in different chapters of the book.That said, I can't recommend this book enough. If you want to learn the ins and outs of developing your own app, this book is a must.

The short review (TL,DR): If you're starting out in iOS development, this book is worth the investment. There are many useful chapters that provide a good foundation to the world of iOS development.Although I do recommend this book for anyone new to iOS, I would not recommend it to anyone new to programming or new to Swift. If you're altogether new to programming, you should look elsewhere. If you're new to Swift, Big Nerd Ranch (BNR) has a book on Swift. I haven't read it, but it's probably pretty decent. Back when I was learning Swift, I used Apple's own "The Swift Programming Language" in iBooks. It's free and it's very good. In any case, I would recommend spending at least a couple of days to a week learning Swift before getting into this book.I have previous editions of this book going back to the first. I haven't checked, but my memory of them is that they went into more detail of the how's and why's of doing things in iOS. To be sure, this (5th edition) does too, but somewhat less so.Two examples of this are:(1) In chapter 17 (Touch Events and UIResponder) all the code for the entire chapter is put into the view, and absolutely none placed in the view controller. This differs from the rest of the book, but they never mention why they do it that way. One answer is reusability, and there are articles about it on the internet, but my point is that this was a missed opportunity to discuss important architectural issues.(2) In a few places, the authors guide the reader to creating IBOutlets for views. The typical method is by control-dragging from the view to the source code file. A dialog pops up, and one of the choices is to create a weak or strong reference. The book states that strong should be selected, but never explains why. Now maybe it's because the old days of retain & release are over, but weak vs. strong is still an issue, and this was another missed opportunity.Unfortunately, in my opinion, the two chapters on Core Data are nearly useless. Core Data is not an easy topic: there are a lot of new classes and concepts completely different from anything learned in UIKit. To relegate it to two relatively small chapters is not really helping anyone. First of all, instead of starting with a simple project, they continue with a fairly complicated one that has been developed over the past two chapters, involving web services, translating JSON, and interfacing with collection views. All very useful skills, but they are a huge distraction when learning something as complicated as Core Data. Also, if you want to skip those two chapters and just learn Core Data, you're out of luck.Most of chapter 21 consists of almost blindly typing code in various places in the project. Yes, the authors explain things, but the explanations are too quick and too obtuse:"...you will instantiate an NSFetchRequest, giving it the 'Photo' entity name. Then you will give the fetch request an array of NSSortDescriptor instances. For Photorama, this array will contain a single sort descriptor that sorts photos by their dateTaken properties. Finally, you will ask the managed object context to execute this fetch request."It's just too much at once. When they write the 6th edition, I hope they retool these chapters.Generally speaking, BNR produces high quality work. The previous editions of this book have been very good. This edition has its issues, but I still recommend it: except for the Core Data section, the rest of the book is useful and instructive. I also especially like the challenges at the end of each chapter, which suggest improvements you can make to the app you just created. Also, I should mention that I've traded a few emails with Christian Keur, and he was very responsive and helpful.All in all, this book gets a thumbs-up from me.

For anyone wanting to learn iOS programming, but feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of resources out there, look no further.The authors of this book do a great job of introducing core iOS programming techniques, concepts, and frameworks to beginner/intermediate programmers. All of this is done by way of building actual apps with explanations along the way so the learning is more hands on rather than concept driven. While no means comprehensive, it's a great starting point to branch off into more complex iOS subjects.The tutorials are taught in Swift, but this doesn't teach the Swift language. There is a separate book for that which is also great I might add.

I am a novice iOS programmer and I find this book really useful to learn the concepts. I could follow the book very well, until I got to the Web Services and Core Data Chapters. Especially Chapter 21 on Core Data was the hardest one to follow. It seems there are a lot of concepts on Core Data that need to be understood, but the author has rushed into developing a fairly complex application in a short chapter. I hope they improve on it in the future. Overall however, I am highly satisfied with this book and would highly recommend it for learning iOS programming using Swift

This book was written for Swift 2 and Swift 3 was released shortly after I started working with the book. That makes following the instructor a little difficult.However, it is still a great book.I was disappointed, however, that Big Nerd Ranch is not going to provide code corrections to the Swift 3 migration. Instead, it will be necessary to buy the sequel to this book, which won't be released until December.

This book will take you through everything you need to know for iOS programming. The authors have a great way of making the complex frameworks seem extremely manageable, and you learn as you go. This is written for someone with basic programming experience, but you certainly don't have to be a great programmer. Highly recommend as a great learning tool for all the basics of iOS programming.

Disclaimer: I have read a third of the book starting from the front cover and then jumped around a bit to some later chapters.I purchased an earlier edition of this book a few years ago to see what all the rage was about with mobile (well, specifically iOS) development. I have not been doing any iOS development for the past 7 months, and so I was looking to jog my memory and get a fresh perspective at iOS development.First and foremost, if you haven't seen the description, this edition uses Swift instead of Objective C. If you're looking to learn iOS with Objective C (I still prefer Objective C, although Swift is growing on me), check out the previous edition of this book, although be warned some of those API's might be deprecated. If you want to learn Objective C by itself, I highly recommend Objective-C Programming by Aaron Hillegass or Programming in Objective C by Stephen G. Kochan.Chapter 1 starts off very basic with an introduction to Xcode, discussion of MVC, and creating layouts. By the end of the chapter, you'll have a functioning "Hello World"-esq application where you have UI elements connected to your View Controller. Chapter 2 covers Swift and some of its nuances that make it really stand apart from Objective C. Here you'll become a bit more familiar with the syntax of writing variables, constants, arrays, methods - the essentials for writing any code. I found the discussion on Swift optional types to be particularly helpful. Chapter 3 starts getting into views, the view hierarchy, and Auto Layout. I was glad to see this chapter came up sooner rather than later. Chapter 3 has you actually create a basic UI and immediately gets you to think about how your views will adjust to different screen sizes. This leads into a discussion on layouts, how constraints fit in, and the chapter walks you step by step on how to leverage layout constraints to get your layout to work.By the end of chapter 6, you'll have the major fundamentals down in terms of how View Controllers work, how navigation can with the UITabBarController, things like the delegation pattern, and also how to construct views manually through code without using Storyboard.From this point, I mostly jumped around other chapters. One nit pick I have is that the discussion on Core Data could probably come up sooner rather than at the tail end of this book. I say this because I've seen folks really struggle with Core Data. In the 5th edition that I am reviewing, it's not until page 382 (Chapter 22) that there's a discussion of how Core Data blocks the main queue, and how this should be addressed. At that point, the discussion is kept pretty simple and the chapter ends 2 pages later. Having personally seen folks shoot themselves in the foot in this area, I think it would have been extremely helpful to have a more detailed discussion.