Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook (Early Edition), The, 4th Edition

Product Author Bios

Erica Sadun (Denver, CO) is the bestselling author, co-author and contributor to more than two dozen books on programming, digital video, digital photography, web design, and other technology topics. Her recent books include The iPhone Developer's Cookbook, 2nd Edition and The iPad Developer's Cookbook . Sadun has authored more than a dozen iPhone-native applications. She has blogged for TUAW.com and O'Reilly's Mac Devcenter and Digital Media sites, and now blogs regularly for Ars Technica. Sadun holds a Ph. D. in Computer Science from Georgia Tech.

Available exclusively through Pearson, Early Edition multi-format eBooks (PDF, ePUB, and MOBI) provide you with early access to important, time-sensitive topics and technologies–before the official publication! The Early Edition eBook has been through preliminary stages of editing and technical review, but content and presentation are not yet final. By purchasing this Early Edition, you automatically will receive an updated, official edition of the multi-format eBook when it is available.

This version of iOS 6 Developer’s Cookbook: Core Recipes for Programmers is based on a late beta version of iOS 6. The final version of this book will be based on final code.

In this book, bestselling author and iOS development guru Erica Sadun brings all of the essential recipes you need to quickly start building successful iOS apps for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch. Sadun has thoroughly revised this book to iOS 6, the latest version of Objective-C, and the latest Xcode development tools.

The iOS 6 Developer’s Cookbook: Core Recipes for Programmers, Fourth Edition is packed with ready-made code solutions for the iOS 6 development challenges you’re most likely to face, eliminating trial-and-error and helping you build reliable apps from the very beginning. Sadun teaches each new concept and technique through robust code that is easy to reuse and extend. This isn’t just cut-and-paste: Using her examples, Sadun fully explains both the “how” and “why” of effective iOS 6 development.

Sadun’s tested recipes address virtually every major area of iOS development, from user interface design to view controllers, gestures and touch, to networking and collections views. Every chapter groups related tasks together, so you can jump straight to your solution, without having to identify the right class or framework first.

Complete your library with the companion to this title, The iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook, Advanced Topics, Fourth Edition, coming soon!

Praise For Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook (Early Edition), The, 4th Edition

"This book builds on and provides by far the most background information on Objective-C and iOS6 of all iOS books I have read so far. It doesn't start right away with a "hello world" program but provides the information you need to really understand what is going on. I have started quite a few iOS books only to stop after a few chapters, but this book does not fall into that category. I have not finished the book that will take weeks, but from what I have read thus far I can recommend it to anyone who wants to really understand what they are doing and how things work in iOS6. Highly recommended to anyone regardless of their level!" — Loukas Nikolaou

"Amazing again, Erica Sadun sets the bar high for both authors and developers with "The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook." Approachable to noobs and applicable to veterans, the Cookbook has recipes that can apply to any level of developer's iOS project. Erica does a great job of combining foundational concepts and frameworks with the latest in iOS features including View Constraints and Collection Views. I've been impressed with Erica's work for years and she always does it with style while making it look easy, which I know as an author and developer, it often isn't."-- Bear Cahill, BrainwashInc.com

"The Core iOS6 Developer’s Cookbook by Erica Sadun is one of a number of books in a series, with this one focusing on the details of core iOS APIs and visual elements.  Previous Developer Cookbooks by Erica have covered iOS extensively from the basics to more advanced topics all in one massive tome.  But given the number of topics to cover, it makes sense to break these out into books that get you up and running to books that cover the more advanced topics.  So this book is not a beginner’s book.  This is the book to get after you have read something on Objective C, gone through tutorials on iOS development, maybe produced an application or two and now want to go beyond the basics to really create that unique application.  Core iOS 6 focuses on the gritty details of many of the APIs and shows you how to add the polish to truly create professional looking applications.  The examples forgo most attempts to use Interface Builder and instead, focus on crafting UI elements in code.  This opens up many cool interface tweaks and Erica has certainly put together a great collection of UI elements that will help increase the look and usability of your applications.  Along the way, Erica provides lots of hints along with cautions on what not to do in order to comply with Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.  Every chapter in this book can be taken completely independent of the other chapters.  This allows you to dive right in on a specific topic, so if you are looking to enhance your use of Table Views, just jump right into that chapter and find out all the ways you can tweak your Table Views.  If you are a professional iOS developer, this is a fantastic book full of recipes that will help your application rise above the rest." — Gary Wilson

"It's a great book, a necessary book for intermediate iOS developers. Most popular topics are not only touched, but also explained in detail, so readers can learn a lot of from it. Furthermore it covers plenty new features introduced in iOS6, it's unbelievable considering the release time of iOS6. What I like most are tricks and tips brought by the book, I definitely will apply them in my Apps. Last but not least is about source code, author puts all source codes on Github so readers can download them and run each recipe, this is amazing - it helps readers understand and reuse/apply these recipes." — John Wen

"I've read quite a lot of iOS Developer books, which try to guide you step by step (showing a lot of screen-dumps) in what to do or what you should expect to see on your screen. If you don't have the specific iOS / Xcode version discussed in the book, you can waste a lot of time or need to Google very often to determine which wizard settings you need to select. This distracts you quite a lot from the real work: coding! For this, the concept of the Cookbook series has been invented IMHO. As promised the book offers a number of interesting "cut-and-paste conveniences" which can be modified and re-used at will. Just as in cooking your own meal, the ingredients can be played and combined with to make your 5-star Michelin /AppStore rated meal / app. In my opinion all chapters in this book cover all necessary topics which may occur in any app you've in mind." — Otto van Verseveld

"Thank you Erica Sadun for The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook. It is an excellent addition to the tools I use to becoming better at writing iOS apps. I love that you have kept up your standard of taking complex topics such as UICollectionViewController, 3D transformations and 2D animations, and making them accessible and understandable. I have already integrated some of her recipes into soon-to-ship code for products for my own clients. More than just copy-and-paste recipes, this book encourages me to understand the deeper thinking that the Apple engineers considered when designing these Frameworks and tools. This book has a permanent place on my iBooks shelf." — Darren Baptiste

"An essential resource for all iOS 6 developers. Provides clear explanations to everyday solutions needed by iOS developers, covering how things happen in practice, pointing out gotchas, how to solve problems, advice on design arounds and working-outside-the-box tips to provide major coding wins. A solid companion and a no-brainer investment for iOS developers moving to the iOS 6 SDK. This book will save you time, pain and will pay for itself." — Carl Grainger

"I began my studies in iOS development in 2009. Erica Sadun's book, “The Core iOS 6 Developer's Cookbook” has been instrumental in advancing my knowledge in a no nonsense way. I found this book to be powerfully written, well organized and designed to help the reader advance their iOS capabilities. I have studied many development books over the last 3 years and Ms. Sadun's is one of the best. She gets right to the point , doesn't add a lot of unnecessary rhetoric, and gives solid advice throughout the book. I see this book as one for anyone interested in iOS development because it covers all the new features of iOS 6, making it a great reference guide. I would recommend this book to anyone who has had at least a college level course in C and who also has a working understanding of Object Oriented Programming. Her directness and brevity makes this book an invaluable “cheat sheet” for moderate and advanced level iOS developers." — Jaime Rae

"The book provides an existing iOS Developer with a number of core recipes from various categories that can be used in iOS. In case a non-iOS Developer picks up the book, it also provides some friendly advice on what materials to obtain for ramping up their knowledge on ObjectiveC before using this book as good reference guide. A note should be provided in the book that not all devices support iOS6 and that those that can support it might not have been upgraded the latest version. A small snippet of code could have been provided to check for this. The book uses the concept of recipes to introduce various features of iOS 6 with explanation. The recipe would have been complete if more comments could be added to explain in the code what is happening. So that this can help the developers in understanding what is being done instead of it being spoon-fed." — Marios Moutzouris

Table of Contents

Preface

Chapter 1 Gestures and Touches

Chapter 2 Building and Using Controls

Chapter 3 Alerting the User

Chapter 4 Assembling Views and Animations

Chapter 5 Introducing View Constraints

Chapter 6 Building Text Entry

Chapter 7 Working with View Controllers

Chapter 8 Using Common Controllers

Chapter 9 Adding Accessibility

Chapter 10 Creating and Managing Table Views

Chapter 11 Presenting Collection Views

Chapter 12 A Taste of Core Data

Chapter 13 Networking Basics

Appendix Objective C Literals