Comments about O'Reilly Media Consuming Web Services on the iPhone:

This is the first O'Reilly video I have reviewed, after mostly being a book reader. Unlike going to sites like Lynda.com to get out whole courses, this is a concise set of videos that total up to 1-2 hours, that serve a specific purpose. This is not for the intermediary developer, but someone in-between, who wants to learn how to do a specific thing.

This video in particular, 'consuming web services' was something I was interested in because most books don't cover this in great detail. They cover the use of NSNetwork but not consuming actual XML data, and placing it in a UITableViewController. So for a reference to something that you can't find some information on, great!

Whether I would want to rely on a lot of videos, not sure.... I would like to see small chapters that are sold rather than whole books, articles on doing particular things, when you don't want to add GBs of videos to your library.
Having said that, I really enjoyed Mike Morrisson and his rundown of the code. It could probably have been explained a bit quicker, but hey everyone is at a different level of programming. I find the video useful and im sure depending on the author and topic it might vary, but my general impression is that its useful for the particular topic I was after.

Comments about O'Reilly Media Consuming Web Services on the iPhone:

When I started to watch this Video podcast I was confused at first. It looked like two guys discuss some demo application you could find plenty of over the Internet – but this was just a beginning. After short description of what we wanted to achieve, Michael jumped right into middle of battle field and showed viewers how to deal with different aspects of web service consumption. He went through most important topics: accessing particular URL, feeding application with data, parsing the XML response, utilizing the data within iPhone application.

There are few points worth mentioning regarding this video. First of all, Michael was very specific and pragmatic – there is no place for greenhorns. You have to be aware of XCode, Objective-C and programming using it when you are going to view this Video, however, if you know all that, and you are looking for answers to particular questions, this is the right place to get answers. Good point here is that Michael showed not only the method, he also pointed out how to use various tools and classes that might help you during Web services development: TouchXML, URL related classes, error handling, Snippet application.

As I mentioned – this Video is not a place for people who start their experience with iOS development. But this is good place for people looking answers for web related development questions.