Ios Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide

I am new to IOS Programming and Swift, although I went through a few online tutorials. I have about 1/4th of the book finished now and the learning curve is very steep. Already the beginning of the book to explain iOS Programming using the MVC model was great to understand the structure of a program and made it much easier to get into the coding and understanding iOS. I also love the challenges at the end of the book, although the authors should offer the results as well somewhere. However, this book is not for beginners in programming. I am an experienced Flash-Actionscript programmer and this helps me a lot to understand the book. So one should at least know one programming language very well and be familiar with the principles of programming including models. One of the challenges I was experiencing at this time (summer 2017) is that most online tutorials, questions-answers in forums all deal with former versions of swift. So you need to work on converting older code to the newest version, which I found also helpful in understanding the code. Also use the xcode playground a lot to work on simple code problems. Generally my opinion is that this is one of the best programming books I have so far read.

Best programming book I've ever learned from. I've purchased a few books in the past for learning Java, but none were written as fluently and as effectively as this one. I'm at chapter 18 right now and I can attest to the helpfulness of the challenges. The challenges at the end of most chapters help you learn how to explore different parts of Swift and how to debug your programs. This is a super valuable skill and I 100% recommend you do ALL of the challenges. Some challenges took me 5 minutes and some of them took me 3 days. However, now that I'm almost done with the book, I've learned a lot of skills that have made the rest of these challenges a piece of cake. Completing the challenges is ESSENTIAL to fully utilizing the power of this book. However, this book is not intended for a brand new programmer. My previous knowledge of Java has helped my progress through this book tremendously. I also took an online course for learning the basics of the Swift programming language and without that, I would be incredibly lost. If you don't already know the basics of the Swift programing language, I recommend you find a tutorial online before purchasing this book. I definitely recommend this book to any programmer trying to learn Swift.

I worked about 90% of the examples in this book, including all the challenge assignments. Most of them worked perfectly and helped me graduate from Objective-C to swift. I would definitely recommend it. But...this book is not for beginning programmers. Nor is it for brand-new swift programmers. If you don't have at least some understanding of ?,! and closures, this book will leave you confused. Good: they stress design from the start. Despite what other reviewers have indicated, they made some effort to distinguish between data sources and delegates, and did not just throw everything into the view controllers. Bad: the web services example is broken. The return from the Flickr ReST call wasn't correct JSON and required some string manipulation to strip off extra characters. I don't know whether they simply didn't test their examples, or whether Flickr changed their API (or some other explanation) but it isn't professional to publish a book like this with errors, especially since the last several chapters depend on getting the web service working. However, despite this issue, I found the book helpful and useful and would strongly recommend it to others.

Having taken a couple of online courses, I can safely say this is the best resource available for learning iOS 10, things are even better explained than the official documentation in my opinion. But being totally new to iOS, it meant that I had to read this material more than once to make it stick. But it's like the authors mention somewhere in the beginning of the book, "You just have to be patient and follow along". My only complaint would be that there are places in which I felt the examples got too tedious to follow, examples are the HTTP App, and the CoreData App samples, the code for those is kind of messy and all over the place IMHO. But, again, it gets better next time you go through it as you kind of figured out what's going on. Still, the best book on iOS 10 by far.

Absolutely fantastic read. I've taken an iOS class at a top 10 university in the U.S., and watched the Stanford iOS video series prior to reading this. This book was EXCELLENT at filling in a lot of knowledge gaps that I had in iOS, and explains them in an incredibly easy way to understand. Bottom line, these cowboys know how to teach. I worked through all of the code challenges, pretty easy but they allowed you to apply what you knew which is critical to really learning.

This book holds your hand while you develop some small apps. It's insightful enough, has code and pictures. It presents basic concepts well. I'd have loved it if it at least tried to mention what other aspects of being an iOS developer it's skipping. For example, readig this book will give you no idea about: -How you write automated tests -Whether "automated tests" even exist (don't laugh, beginners wouldn't know this) -What platforms you use for helping test your app on multiple devices -How you publish your app -How you use third party libraries -Whether third party libraries exist at all (don't laugh, a beginner would have no way of guessing this, if learning alone) -Whether or how code in objective c can interact with code written in Swift -Whether one has to learn both swift and objective C -Whether such a thing as a "application architecture" exists -Where explicitly to get more resources from (oh well, except the Apple documentation that is) -Where do the pros get their info from? (any podcasts, tweeter handles, subreddits, git repos) -What are some major popular frameworks used in the ecosystem, and what do they do? ...important aspects in my opinion Let me also mention the lack of references in the book. Maybe this book is supposed to be for beginners, but I didn't get that idea from the introduction. Maybe if I knew who this book is and is not for, I would not have purchased this. My complaint about this book comes from my specific context: I've been programming for 7 years already, and I know the basics of app development. I also know that there are lots of very important things that come after the basics. If you're looking for more than the basics, this book is not for you. If you just want a thorough introduction to the Swift language and iOS, I definitely recommend this. For me personally, it's barely 3 stars, and would not have bought it if I knew it focuses so much on building lots of similar apps, but gives you almost no overview of the iOS development ecosystem

This is a great book. I bought it for a class and I only had to read about half the chapters. I read the other half out of enjoyment because it is written very well and is very informative. I also bought the swift programming book for them and it pairs very nicely.

Very powerful and great code. My issue is that I can do the examples in a chapter, when I go to the next chapter and I don't fully understand either the concept yet or the actions required, if I continue with the same name for the file I lose everything that was previously developed. I think their books to start the chapter indicating to same the File as WorldTrotter, then the next chapter WorldTrotter2, and later WorldTrotter3. Very frustrating when you are just learning the concepts and you lose the program because you are trying to implement the code but something is not quite right. Takes a lot of time to recreate the program again if you mess it up. OS12 is not very forgiving. This is my only criticism. Very powerful book.

Very well written and excellent tutorials and code samples throughout the book. The style of teaching is very good: It doesn't overload you with theory and instead uses a very practical hands-on approach. The only minor negative is that it doesn't teach about CocoaPods or Carthage or unit testing.

Excelente introdução à programação para iOS usando Swift. Após leitura completa do livro - fazendo os exemplos - já se tem um domínio razoável do assunto e é possível fazer muito coisa. Para quem já domina o assunto e navega com facilidade na documentação oficial da Apple, acredito que não acrescenta muito.

Buen libro para aprender a programar en swift, con ilustraciones e instrucciones bastante claras, envio rapido y bien envuelto, un golpe en la esquina del libro, pero nada significativo

Ottimo libro per l’apprendimento della programmazione in ambiente iOS.

Hands-on; very thorough. There will be a number of stumbling blocks as your version of Xcode & Swift might be newer from what the authors have tested their code on; but most are easily resolved.