Great Price "iPhone Game Development (Developer Reference)" for $26.94 Today
I've had this book a while and after actually reading the book - unlike others - I wanted to add my 2 cents worth. Looking at the other reviews, I realized the main problem with this book is that it has the WRONG title. It should have been titled to "Beginning iPhone Game Development."
The books does great at getting you started. If you have an iPhone and just bought a Mac cause you want to start making iPhone Games - then this is a good book to start with. The author's even recommend start small and get a 0 Mac mini - to keep cost down. Of course, that is a common theme in this book - just the minimums to get you started on the tools and development environment. You start with getting you familiar with Apple's Developer Network and walks you through getting applications up and running on your iPhone. You even start with the obligatory "Hello World" app.
I must state that this book will not teach you how to write the next DOOM-Like 3d million dollar game for the iPhone. But you will learn to develop simple games on the iPhone that can be an attainable starting point for further research and development. There is also a lot of code resources on their site with great samples and resources.
If you have never programmed on a Mac or used Xcode/Objective-c on your Mac... then this book is a good place to get your feet wet in iPhone development. As a Windows Developer for years, Mac development if very different and Objective-C is a horrible language to just "pick up." so, that made this book a great place to start. Of course, if you have been doing Apple Mac programming for years with XCode/Objective-C, then you might want to skip this book and look for something deeper - cause you are not a beginner. As I said, the title is what is wrong not the book itself. I would rate this book for Novice to Intermediate. I do not agree with the publishers listing of Intermediate to Advance.
iPhone Game Development (Developer Reference) Features
- ISBN13: 9780470496664
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Rating : 
Price : $49.99
Offer Price : $26.94
iPhone Game Development (Developer Reference) Overviews
New Apple Developer Series!
A technical and business guide to creating and selling iPhone games
If you've always wanted to develop a cool iPhone game application and sell it for big bucks, this book is for you. iPhone Game Development covers all technical and commercial bases, from how to sign up for the Apple Development Program, master the development tools in the iPhone SDK, publish your game to the App Store, and convince people to buy it.
You'll find full coverage of Cocoa Touch and other great features of the iPhone SDK, plus pages of real-world examples with step-by-step explanations. The book also includes loads of royalty-free code you can use for commercial development.
- Apple's iPhone is not only a mobile phone, it's also a game platform rivaling big names like Nintendo and Sony; anyone can sign up for the Apple Developer Program and publish their works to the App Store
- This hip book written by two successful gamers with over a decade of game development experience will teach you both the technical and business aspects of developing and publishing a game to the App Store, plus how to convince end-users to buy it
- Includes examples with step-by-step explanations of actual games and apps currently on the App Store
- A Companion Web site provides royalty-free code from the samples in the book, which you can use to jumpstart your own game development
Save weeks of development time with the expert guidance you'll find in iPhone Game Development!
Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
Customer Review
DO NOT BUY! - J. Heller - Athens, GA, USA
As this book is a shallow attempt at "reference" and "teaching", I have written several responses to the publisher and the authors at AppsAmuck to no avail. Here's just one of the e-mails:
"Your book, "iPhone Game Development", is a complete waste of money! The source is outdated and no longer works with current versions of Xcode and InterfaceBuilder. It's sad when I can't find supplemental links to the source code found on the CD-ROM because I purchased the eBook. That should have been included with a download link! You can't even progress past Chapter 2: Hello, World! because the instructions are no longer valid. You and your publisher don't even have a website to publish updates to the book, which is VERY important for a book dealing with programming and development. I am telling everyone I know to no longer purchase this book, or any other books written by AppsAmuck or published by Wiley Publishing. I would enjoy a refund but knowing you probably wrote the book for monetary reasons (as it doesn't even include any useful information on dealing with Cocoa Touch or OpenGL ES and instead rambles on about the app marketplace for no reason whatsoever) that's not likely possible. I will be posting a one star negative review of your book on Amazon.com so that others may know that your products are complete ripoffs and not supported. Get with the program, you should know as an "app developer" that the number one thing to do is keep your product updated and relevant.
You are NOT relevant. Deleted from my Kindle."
Not much of a game development book. - John Donovan - Germany
I wouldn't recommend this book if you wish to learn iPhone Game Development, they don't even have a reference to sprites, they don't run animations such as a walk cycle they show nothing of much use to 2D games unless they are games such as a tic tac toe or puck - i.e. where there are no animations just a solid state image bouncing about. The book is useful in other ways though so its not a complete loss, they do deal in detail with peer-to-peer networking etc such stuff which does belong in a game programming book and are very useful to know, so I wouldn't recommend this book if you would like to know how to code games with animations involving sprites but it is useful to have to know about networking specific to games so I would recommend it from that viewpoint which is why it got 3 stars and not 1.
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