Click the photo to see O’Reilly’s deals page.
Today is Steve Jobs’ birthday, and O’Reilly’s commemorating it with a 50% off sale on all Apple ebooks and videos. Just use the discount code DEAL when buying them from O’Reilly store before February 25, 2014 at 5:00 a.m. Pacific (GMT – 8), and you’ll be able to get them for half price.
Recommended
At half price, there are some particularly good deals, including:
iOS 7 Programming Fundamentals, by Matt Neuberg. If you’re an experienced developer, but new to Objective-C (and haven’t touched C in a while) and iOS, this is a good introduction. The book is divided into three parts:
- Language: Starts with a chapter titled “Just enough C” to get you comfortable, then spends the rest of its time getting you up to speed on Objective-C’s way of using classes, objects, and messaging.
- IDE: Once you’re familiar with the language, this next section covers working with Xcode projects, building user interfaces with Xcode, the editor and debugging tools, and what you need to do to deploy apps to devices.
- Cocoa: This section covers those parts of the Cocoa framework that you’re most likely to use, as well as issues of memory management and communication between objects.
At half price, the book is US$15.99, which makes for a pretty sweet deal.
iOS 7 Programming Cookbook, by Vandad Nahavandipoor. Once you’ve dipped your toe into iOS programming, you’ll find this book useful, as it’s a “how do I do this?” reference for iOS developers. Yes, you’ll find a lot of this information scattered all over the place online, but it’s often nice to have it gathering up into a single package, which this book does pretty well.
At half price, this book goes for $21.99.
Not Recommended
If you look at the Head First series of books on Amazon, you’ll find that they generally get great reviews. Not Head First iPhone and iPad Development, which got a low number of stars and is a bit disappointing compared to other Head First programming books I’ve read (especially the various editions of Head First C#). The just-released third edition of Head First iPhone and iPad Development seems to have cut out material that appeared in the second, has some sloppy editing, and reads like as though it were put together by contractual obligation. At half price, it’s US$13.99.
If you’re looking for a beginner-friendly intro to iOS development, I’d much rather you got your paws on The iOS Apprentice from Ray Wenderlich’s site. It may not be as cheap as Head First iPhone and iPad Development, but you’ll get way more bang for your developer tutorial buck.