Hold an iPad in your hands and you'll know what the fuss is all about. Select an app and the device disappears as you find yourself immersed in the experience--the iPad defines a new category for devices. iPad Programming shows you how to build apps for the iPad that people will love to use.
This quick-start guide will have you writing iPad apps right away using a combination of the familiar iPhone APIs along with the new APIs and additional templates designed specifically for creating iPad applications.
The iPad has a display that's more than seven times as big as the iPhone. The metaphors are different; the application design is different. Users will be able to interact with your iPad app in new ways. In this book you'll learn to take advantage or the additional real estate and functionality.
Every time you turn around it seems as if there's another ten thousand apps added to the App Store for the iPhone. If you're building iPad-specific apps, it's a brand new day with plenty of opportunity. In this book we don't just teach you to write apps that run on an iPad, we teach you to create apps that delight users because they wouldn't make sense running on any other device.
Daniel H Steinberg wrote "Cocoa Programming: A Quick-Start guide for Developers," the Pragmatic Programmers' best selling book on developing Cocoa applications for Snow Leopard. A long-time Mac developer, Daniel also teaches courses on Mac OS X, iPhone, and iPad development for the Pragmatic Studios.
Eric T Freeman is a media company executive and co-author of two bestselling books: "Head First Design Patterns" and "Head First HTML & CSS." A computer scientist with a passion for media and software architectures, Eric has been an Apple programmer since the days of the Newton. Eric holds a Ph.D. from Yale University.
Comments about Pragmatic Bookshelf iPad Programming:
`iPad Programming' is designed as a quick-start guide for existing iPhone developers to get to grips with developing for iPad. Over the course of 13 chapters and 228 pages, the authors Daniel Steinberg and Eric Freeman take us through a number of key development concepts using straight-forward explainations and examples. The example code can be downloaded online so you can learn with them.
As an existing beginner iPhone developer myself, I found the first chapter very helpful as it talks through converting an existing iPhone app so that it runs on both iPhone and iPad (a `Universal' app). New iPad-specific functions such as split-view are explained, and in later chapters, custom keyboards, custom drawing, gestures and connecting to other devices are all covered. Key concepts are not explored in massive detail, but that's not the point of this book - it's a quick-start guide to get you quickly up and running... and it works! I had coded my first iPad app after just one day with this book and Steinberg and Freeman's explanation's are informal and easy to read which made me keen to learn more,
If I had to draw any negatives from the book, I'd mention the issue that inevitably all other technology/software books, the content ages quite quickly. Even though this title was only published in September 2010, just five months ago - iOS 4 has since been released for iPad, bringing a lot of changes and new functionality to developers (Airprint, Airplay, GameCenter, multitasking and lots more). The good news is that `iPad Programming' chapters and code examples are all still relevant and work well, its just that you won't see any coverage here of the new features of iOS 4.
Recommended quick-start guide for existing iPhone developers looking to expand to iPad development.
DISCLAIMER: I received a review copy of this book.
