Development for Beginners

Hey,
I am looking into developing Apps. I have been reading into a book called "iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners" by Dr. Rory Lewis. I checked it out at my College Library. It requires the 2009 SDK and I can't find a version of it that runs on OS X Mountain Lion. Is there another book at there of similar quality that I could use?

I have his IOS 5 Edition.

Good read iPhone and iPad Apps for Absolute Beginners,iOS 5 Edition: Rory Lewis: 9781430236023: Amazon.com: Books

Is it easy to use with the newest version of Xcode? I know that this edition asks me to use buttons etc. that no longer exist in Xcode.

Anyone?

If the book is recent enough, there might be an errata for the book that addresses any changes to Xcode or whatever. But usually, I've found that you can figure out what the changes would/could be and deal with them yourself..

Raz0rEdge said:

But usually, I've found that you can figure out what the changes would/could be and deal with them yourself..

Click to expand...

You can also do some research online to see what changes might have occurred. For instance, I have an older Python book that I still refer to once in a while but use the Internet to see what might have changed. This way, the book can provide me with the language specifics and I can search for "how to do X in Python 2.7" if it has changed.

I've been playing with some coding recently (getting back into iOS development) and with the latest version of Xcode and the book I am using, there are marked differences in the dialogs and buttons. But additionally, there is now something called ARC (Automatic Reference Counting) with the later SDK's that affects memory management.

So now where ever in the book it says to call "[super dealloc]" or whatever, with ARC enabled, you will get a warning (or even error) that this isn't needed. So you have to knowingly adjust your code for it.

Realize that these sorts of books have to pick a particular version of software/tool (especially for the screenshots) when writing the book. So it's hard for them to update the book for changes in the tool.

To alleviate these issues, you can of course (wherever possible) use the exact same tool that they are referencing in the book and then switch to the newer versions after you've learned the tool..

Raz0rEdge said:

Realize that these sorts of books have to pick a particular version of software/tool (especially for the screenshots) when writing the book. So it's hard for them to update the book for changes in the tool.

Click to expand...

One of the major problems with writing a book is how long it takes from start to finish. By the time you've written it, had it edited and get through publishing, it's already close to out of date. This is probably even more pronounced in the technology world which moves faster than most others.