Beginning iOS 5 Development

I’m pleased to announce that Beginning iOS 5 Development has made its way into the world. The text was completed in November, the ebook was released just before Christmas, and the print book should be shipping any day now.

This book is the latest edition of what was previously known as Beginning iPhone X Development, where most of those X values were in sync with the latest released iPhone at the time of writing. Now times have changed, iOS has spread from the iPhone to the iPad, and this year brought no new iPhone 5 to keep our book title in sync, so we took the obvious step of re-naming the book after the latest iOS version instead.

For the current edition, we’re not only covering lots of the great new things included with iOS 5, we’ve also updated the entire book to cover Xcode 4.2. This means that you can use the latest and greatest Apple tools to work your way through the examples in the book, and everything should look and work just as we describe it in the book. The previous edition covered Xcode 3.2, and anyone who’s been following the evolution of Xcode is probably familiar with the huge changes that occurred with the Xcode 4 release. Overall, this edition is probably the most significant rewrite since the first edition. If you have an older edition of the book and need a refresher, I think you’ll find this new edition to be a great resource for expanding your iOS development skills. And of course if you’re a newcomer to the book, I’d absolutely recommend you start with this latest edition.

Funny story: We actually did a whole lot of writing for Xcode 4.0 over a year ago, when we were working on the previous edition of the book, but had to backtrack when the public release of Xcode 4.0 was delayed. Then, as fate would have it, Xcode 4.0 was released to the public just a few weeks after the previous edition came out, which really felt like a kick in the rear. For the new edition, there were so many changes between Xcode 4.0 and 4.2 that we abandoned the Xcode 4.0 work we had done earlier, and recreated all our examples and descriptions from scratch for Xcode 4.2. Oh, the things we do for you people!

Anyway, the book is now available for purchase. If you want the print version, you should probably get it from Amazon which sells it way below the Apress list price. Amazon also sells a Kindle edition of course, but if you want to go the ebook route you may want to buy it directly from Apress, where for a few dollars more you have a choice of formats (epub, mobi, PDF). And don’t forget to register for free at our official forum to get access to the archive containing all source code and other resources used in the book. Happy hacking!