Although each programmer brings different goals and experiences to the table, most iPhone developers end up solving similar tasks in their development work:
- "How do I build a table?"
- "How do I create a secure Keychain entry?"
- "How do I search the Address Book?"
- "How do I move between views?"
- "How do I use Core Location and the iPhone 3GS's magnetometer?"
And so on. If you've asked yourself these questions, then this book is for you. The iPhone Developer's Cookbook will get you up to speed and working with the iPhone SDK, offering you ready-to-use solutions for the apps you're building today.
Contrast that to Apple's standard sample code, where you must comb through many files in order to build up a mental model of the concepts that are on-offer. Those samples are built as full applications, often doing tasks that are related to but not essential to what you need to solve. Finding just those relevant portions is a lot of work. The effort may outweigh any gains.
There are two exceptions to this one-file rule. First, application-creation walkthroughs use the full file structure created by Xcode to mirror the reality of what you'd expect to build on your own. The walk through folders may therefore contain a dozen or more files at once.
Second, standard class and header files are provided when the class itself is the recipe or provides a pre-cooked utility class. Instead of highlighting a technique, some recipes offer these pre-cooked class implementations and categories (that is, extensions to a pre-existing class rather than a new class). For those recipes, look for separate .m and .h files in addition to the skeletal main.m that encapsulates the rest of the story.
For the most part, the samples for this book use a single application identifier, com.sadun.helloworld. You will need to replace this identifier with one that matches your provision profile. This book uses one identifier to avoid clogging up your iPhone with dozens of samples at once. Each sample replaces the previous one, ensuring that SpringBoard remains relatively uncluttered. If you want to install several samples at once, simply edit the identifier, adding a unique suffix, such as com.sadun.helloworld.table-edits.