I bought this book with the intent of making my first game ever, after studying objective C for about 3 months on my own. I took one entry level programming course in college (java language), and that was all the experience I had. Now after reading this book, using the cocos2d-iphone forums, and lots of hard work, I am almost finished making my first iPhone game.
Itterheim's book is very well written, with a good amount of time spent on code structure and theory, so that even beginners (like me) will end up with a professional looking final product. The writing style is a "No BS, let's get something done!" kind of attitude. I loved using this as a tutorial to making cocos2d games, and it also serves as a good reference when I get lost. For example, I think to myself "How should I go about making a 2-dimensional array of objects... and, do I need to retain these?" I cracked open this book and got my answer in a jiffy.
Anyways, enough flattery. Bottom line: this is a good book for beginners to learn how to make iPhone/iPod/iPad games. Period.
If you've got an iPad 3, you might be curious (and also frustrated by the early release of) the iPad 4, which adds a new CPU and the lightning charging port. The most notable feature, certainly, is the faster CPU, which Apple claims to provide double the performance than the A5x, found inside the iPad 3. In our review of the iPad 3, we charged that it was not significantly faster than the iPad 2, offering up occasional lag and stutters. The A6 chip, making its debut in the iPhone 5, is much more promising than was the A5. It's a 32nm CPU that provides increased performance and lower power consumption. So the million-dollar question is: how much faster is the iPad 4 than the iPad 3, and are there other benefits to the new chip like better gaming and improved battery life? While it'll take us some time to answer to latter two questions, this video answers the former, as we put the devices head-to-head in start-up time, app launching speed, WiFi performance, and web-browsing performance. The results? The iPad 4 is indeed faster than the 3, but not by leaps and bounds. In fact, we were surprised by how similar the performance is of both of these tablets when browsing the web, launching apps, and starting up. The difference is a second here, two seconds there. We can safely say that if you're an iPad 3 owner and are considering an upgrade, we would advise you not to. The difference in performance is just not significant It's possible that we have yet to see apps take advantage ...
