iPhone 3G Made Simple comes by way of Martin Trautschold and Gary Mazo of Made Simple book and e-book fame — likely familiar names to any of our CrackBerry.com friends — have put their training talents to work on the iPhone 3G and the result? 376 pages chock full of photos and easy to understand guides.
It’s available now in e-book (PDF) for $20 and is coming in August in good old printed form (soft cover). For TiPb readers, however, Martin and Gary are giving away 5 free copies of the e-book!
Just head on over to the TiPb iPhone Forum and let us know you want a copy!
Sure, we lost iGoogle, but we gained Gmail Tasks, have been promised Google Latitude, and now have been served up a piping hot portion of Google Books optimized for the iPhone.
Authors, no doubt, may continue to have a problem with Google willfully ignoring copyright for their own content lust, while mobile users jump up and down in glee, like one author and mobile accomplisher, Andy Ihnatko is doing on his Celestial Waste of Bandwidth:
Yes, all 1.5 million public-domain texts in the Google Books project are now available to mobile users, behind a fairly awesome, slick interface. [...] And I scroll down a bit and find many titles of interest. I give one of ‘em a tap, and soon I’m looking at a very credible little mobile book reader. [..] Good golly. If Google is evil, then they’re a Doctor Doom sort of evil. What’s a little evil, when the totalitarian dictator takes such wonderful, indulgent care of his subjects?
Indeed. Google is really stepping up to showcase what great WebApps can still do in the post-App Store iPhone world. Any ebook aficionados try this out yet? How does it compare to native apps like Classic and Stanza? And how does the iPhone experience compare to the Kindle for that matter?
No sooner did Apple drop the iPhone SDK Non-Disclosure Agreement (fondly referred to as the [Redacted] NDA among aficionados, as it forbade developers discussing the topic even among themselves), then the floodgates of knowledge burst open. Cases in point:
According to TUAW, iPhone coder extraordinaire Erica Sadun’s The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook is already available in PDF form from informIT (along with code samples!):
If you’re getting started with iPhone programming, this book brings together tested, ready-to-use code for hundreds of the challenges you’re most likely to encounter. Use this fully documented, easy-to-customize code to get productive fast—and focus your time on the specifics of your application, not boilerplate tasks.
Meanwhile, Mike Clark writes in to let us know that Pragmatic Programmers is now offering a set of screencasts targeted specifically at iPhone developers:
There’s also a free (no account required) 20-minute “Getting Started with Xcode and Interface Builder” screencast [where Bill Dudney] shows you how to build the simplest of iPhone apps (a Hello World app). More important, he shows you how it works—from the main functions triggering Nib files being loaded, to wiring up interface controls, and all the way through a button push running code that you write.
Of course, Apple itself is going on a World Tour and is revving up the iPhone Developer University Program.
Seriously. Has there ever been a better time to develop for the iPhone?
