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Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa |  | Author: Jonathan Stark
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Category: Book
List Price: $29.99
Buy New: $17.88
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Seller: fantastic_shopping
Rating:  23 reviews
Sales Rank: 4439
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 192
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.9 x 0.5
ISBN: 0596805780
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.1
EAN: 9780596805784
ASIN: 0596805780
Publication Date: January 19, 2010
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
What people are saying about Building iPhone Apps w/ HTML, CSS, and JavaScript "The future of mobile development is clearly web technologies like CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Jonathan Stark shows you how to leverage your existing web development skills to build native iPhone applications using these technologies."
--John Allsopp, author and founder of Web Directions "Jonathan's book is the most comprehensive documentation available for developing web applications for mobile Safari. Not just great tech coverage, this book is an easy read of purely fascinating mobile tidbits in a fun colloquial style. Must have for all PhoneGap developers."
-- Brian LeRoux, Nitobi Software
It's a fact: if you know HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, you already have the tools you need to develop your own iPhone apps. With this book, you'll learn how to use these open source web technologies to design and build apps for the iPhone and iPod Touch on the platform of your choice-without using Objective-C or Cocoa. Device-agnostic mobile apps are the wave of the future, and this book shows you how to create one product for several platforms. You'll find guidelines for converting your product into a native iPhone app using the free PhoneGap framework. And you'll learn why releasing your product as a web app first helps you find, fix, and test bugs much faster than if you went straight to the App Store with a product built with Apple's tools. - Build iPhone apps with tools you already know how to use
- Learn how to make an existing website look and behave like an iPhone app
- Add native-looking animations to your web app using jQTouch
- Take advantage of client-side data storage with apps that run even when the iPhone is offline
- Hook into advanced iPhone features -- including the accelerometer, geolocation, and vibration -- with JavaScript
- Submit your applications to the App Store with Xcode
This book received valuable community input through O'Reilly's Open Feedback Publishing System (OFPS). Learn more at http://labs.oreilly.com/ofps.html.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
 Gets around some of the ugliness of dealing with Objective-C January 31, 2010
calvinnme
11 out of 13 found this review helpful
As an IPhone app developer you've probably found that Objective-C is difficult to learn, rather counter-intuitive in syntax, and not very useful outside of the Mac programming world. Also, trying to get an app into the App store is like dealing with airport security - byzantine rules unevenly enforced and guaranteed long waits. Updates also take long time periods, and if your updates are in response to bugs you can quickly get a bad rep as a developer. This book shows you how to use commonly and long-used web technologies to build your application as a web app, have it tested on the web where you can quickly make changes in response to bugs, and then when you are ready, the book shows you how to use PhoneGap to convert your web app to a native iPhone app.
This book assumes that you have basic experience reading and writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, SQL, and jQuery. The author has a very brief overview of these technologies in the book, but it isn't enough if you lack experience, and it is duplication of what you already know if you have experience. The book largely avoids the iPhone SDK but you will need access to a Mac for the material in Chapter 7 on PhoneGap. This is the chapter where the author shows you how to convert a web app into a native app that can be submitted to the App Store.
The book is short, but it is adequate and clearly written for the task at hand. I'd recommend it to anyone who is tired of dealing with Objective-C and is looking for an easier way to write and test IPhone apps.
Saved me hundreds of dollars, tens of hours March 21, 2010
Seth C. Hayward
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
I have always used my iPod Touch religiously since the moment I got one. I've always wanted to build apps for it - but these were my obstacles:
(1) I don't have Mac OS
(2) I can't afford to invest hundreds of dollars into something I'm not sure is the right choice yet (Mac OS, Apple Developer program, books, etc)
(3) I build in VB.NET/ASP.NET, I use Visual Studio .NET. I curse them daily, but I like them.
(4) Have you heard what developers are saying about the App Store? It doesn't sound very friendly. I built apps on Facebook before, it doesn't feel that great to have a huge company telling you what you can and can't do. It's their right, of course, but an obstacle for me.
This book really surprised me - because it basically has the answers to the above obstacles. Namely, a web-based application approach. There are negatives, sure (I would say animation being the biggest one) - but the absolute beauty of this approach is that those negatives will eventually become less important over time. A big part of this approach is a reliance on open source jQuery plugins. Stark introduces these open source authors and projects succinctly and with full respect.
Before you go down the Objective-C route, give this book a shot. It made me seriously rethink a bunch of assumptions that I had made about an iPhone application. That alone was well worth price. Plus - look at what this book covers in the first few chapters, then compare that to the Objective-C/Cocoa books. This is a faster approach if you already have a web application in place.
On a side note, this books (with some tweaking) could make a good high school textbook. Teenagers today have a good grasp of HTML and CSS (see: Tumblr), and can be introduced to more advanced topics like jQuery and data storage if they see a benefit to actually learning it.
Great resource for web developers who want to write for the iPhone February 13, 2010
Scott C. Koon (Seattle, WA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a great overview of how to style your web site for the iPhone. It provides a basic introduction to HTML and CSS and covers some of the iPhone webkit specific CSS classes and meta tags. There is a brief introduction to the jQuery Touch JavaScript framework. The book also covers using the PhoneGap framework for writing native iPhone applications using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
Some of the highlights of this book include a helpful Pro/Con list at the beginning to help you decide if learning Objective-C and using CocoaTouch to write an iPhone app is what you want to do. It would have been nice to also cover, or mention, the Appcellerator mobile framework to build native iPhone applications. There are two great chapters that cover using client side storage in your applications and also techniques for making sure your applications work when the phone is offline.
If you are somewhat familiar with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS and want to write a web based iPhone application I would highly recommend this book.
Start riding the mobile wave using what you already know! February 13, 2010
Frankle (United States / Global)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
When I got the book, I thought it was a little thin and wondered about it's completeness of topics. But Jonathan really only said what he had to in order to explain the topics. I now think the brevity is a strength and will help the lurkers come out from the dark and see how existing technologies can deliver cutting edge results.
If you have only HTML and CSS experience, get this book! He shows how to make web and stand alone apps using cool Javascript frameworks that do all the hard stuff for you.
And if you're like me, and learning Objective-C sounds about as appetizing as chewing on rocks, this book also will get you rolling on building your own apps for the iTunes store - but using HTML. Killer no?
Highly recommended. Great 'show me' style of explaining how the code works. No errors or mistakes in the code examples at all.
Most Excellent February 19, 2010
Ron Braithwaite
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Building iPhone Apps by Jonathan Stark is the best book I have read on the subject of using Javascript, CSS and HTML to build an iPhone app. In fact, it is the only one so far that focuses on that, rather than just making this subject a section of the book. Furthermore, it's the first book that I know of to cover building an app for using PhoneGap to sell in the AppStore. The examples are good and concise, too.
At 166 pages, it isn't nearly as thick as many of the technical books in my library, but it says more than 98% of them, while making sure that you've got the foundation to build on before moving forward. One of the other reviews wrote that the book had a slow start. No, I don't think so - instead the author was making sure that the reader is on the same page before taking off.
In fact, that is probably the best thing about this book. It is concise, while trying to make sure that the reader is keeping up.
Highly recommended!
Ron Braithwaite
Showing reviews 1-5 of 23
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