I recently read half of Matt Neuburg’s book Programming iOS 5 as a part of my summer vacation to get introduced to a client-side platform. I was bored of working on back-end  programs for many years and now I would like to discover dynamics of client programming.

First of all, this book is very long. I have read its ePub version, but the printed version is 1016 pages long. It has 40 chapters and tells many topics in details. However, I would like to tell you why I didn’t like it in the first place. The book tells about Objective-C language internals, iOS/Cocoa Framework internals very detailed. It is not designed in a cookbook or tutorial fashion. Instead, it tells you how the language works. I wish it would teach me “how to get things done” but halfway through the book (and skimmed the rest through the Table of Contents) I learned many details about the language and framework and nothing else at all.

I spent two weeks reading this book and I had almost no hands-on experience at all. The only part you work with Xcode IDE is in Nib chapter building connections with UI and code. Instead of telling me about the app architecture, this book would have taught me how to accomplish several common tasks. I don’t know what forced author to follow a bottom-up approach but it is not good in this case.

The book had a lot of parts about manual memory management which is not so crucial in iOS 5 apps (because of automatic reference counting feature). He implies that unnoticeable optimizations are not so important but in the book he wrote quite a long chapter about a deprecated issue. The book, disappointingly, has almost no chapters or tutorials about Storyboard feature iOS 5, which is extremely important.

Author himself does not have any incredible apps on App Store. He previously worked with AppleScript, RealBASIC and Ruby. So I believe this might be the reason underlying the problem of aiming hackers of today. I would expect tutorials, more code examples. I am no frequent programming book reader however this book literally cost me 2 weeks whereas I would be able to learn I need in less than a week from some other cookbook. This book is truly not for saving the day, thus I don’t recommend.