Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #232501 in Books
• Published on: 2009-01-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 392 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780596154059
• Condition: USED - VERY GOOD
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

About the Author
Jonathan Zdziarski is better known as the hacker "NerveGas" in the iPhone development community. His work in cracking the iPhone helped lead the effort to port the first open source applications, and his book, iPhone Open Application Development, taught developers how to write applications for the popular device long before Apple introduced its own SDK. Prior to the release of iPhone Forensics, Jonathan wrote and supported an iPhone forensics manual distributed exclusively to law enforcement. Jonathan frequently consults law enforcement agencies and assists forensic examiners in their investigations. He teaches an iPhone forensics workshop in his spare time to train forensic examiners and corporate security personnel.

Jonathan is also a full-time research scientist specializing in machine learning technology to combat online fraud and spam, an effort that led him to develop networking products capable of learning how to protect customers. He is founder of the DSPAM project, a high-profile, next-generation spam filter that was acquired in 2006 by Sensory Networks, Inc. He lectures widely on the topic of spam and is a foremost researcher in the fields of machine-learning and algorithmic theory.

Jonathan's website is zdziarski.com.

Customer Reviews

A train wreck in a paper package...
Okay.. I'm not even sure where to start. So, I'll start where the author does in chapter 2. At random points. And I will switch threads of thought like a rabid ferret on caffeine, just like the author. Oh, wait, no, I want you to GET something out of this review, so I will try and be clear.

I've made it through 2.5 chapters of this train wreck of a book, so maybe it gets better. In chapter 2, he obstensably shows you how to build an iPhone app with Interface Builder. However, it's not complete. He says things like, "Set the buttons correctly, and proceed to the next section." Of course, he doesn't tell you what "correctly" means. And he does have some goal in mind. He jumps between points of view. And ends up with a program that's not functional. No full source provided. When I wrote in to complain about this, they said, "Just download the full source from our website." I did. It doesn't include source for the program in Chapter 2. It starts at Chapter 3.

Moving along to Chapter 3, it gets better. The first program, HelloView (a simple 'load and do nothing' program actually works. The second program, it's obvious he never TRIED it before. He puts two different classes into the same source file. Not great style to encourage, but, we all get lazy and it's a small program. As soon as you move the cursor over the old UIView variable declaration, the entire XCode IDE spins to 100% CPU usage and locks up (which is 100% reproducable). This doesn't happen if you put the classes in separate files. That's not a bug with this book, per se, but he does lead you down the garden path into exercising a bug in XCode. Again, it suggests he never tested his own code.

Now, that's as far as I've gotten, and I bought it on Sunday.

horrible
Horrible horrible book. Rushes through the basics in a very confusing way. He uses words instead of pictures or screenshots to try to convey what you should be seeing on your screen, or looking for. XCode can get very cluttered very easily so pictures would be much more descriptive than words (a picture is worth 1000 words to be exact!). There are many typos and errors. There aren't many iPhone books out currently, and this is near the bottom of the bunch. I own them all. This book is more like one of O'Reilly's "Nutshell" books, maybe useful to a certain few people but not terribly comprehensive. I feel like O'Reilly just wanted to get an iPhone book out ASAP, without really focussing on usefulness or ease of reading, and not proofreading very carefully.

A waste of time and money
Where do these people learn to program? Just reading the examples in the book tells one how superficial and confused this author's brain is. And don't give me the "...my intention is not to provide the most efficient code..." excuse. This is nothing but bad code. The text itself is no better. Just read the What's Going On sections.

I've read the first 3 chapters and already looking for something else. Don't waste your time and money. I've been programming for 25 years and it is hard to find a worse book than this one. It is the typical "get it out the door" text.