iPhone Open Application Development
Certain technologies bring out everyone's hidden geek and the iPhone did the moment it was released. Even though Apple created the iPhone as a closed device tens of thousands of developers bought them with the expressed purpose of designing and running third-party software.

In this book, Jonathan Zdziarski -- one of the original hackers of the iPhone -- explains the iPhone's native environment and how you can build software for this device using its Objective-C C and C++ development frameworks. iPhone Open Application Development walks you through the iPhone's proprietary development environment offers an overview of the Objective-C language you'll use with it and supplies background for the iPhone operating system.

You also get detailed recipes and working examples for everyone's favorite iPhone features -- graphics and audio programming interfaces for adding multitouch functionality to games the use of hardware sensors and the device's vast user interface kit.

Computing Unplugged's evaluation
Overall, we liked this book, but were somewhat disappointed that it doesn't cover the new iPhone 2.0 development environment, the iPhone App store, and how to develop software legitimately. Admittedly, the book was published before the new iPhone 3D was announced, but we would have liked to see at least one chapter on the new iPhone SDK.

Because of that, we had to drop a star and rate this a 3-out-of-5. Hopefully, there'll be another edition that brings everything up to date.

iPhone Open Application Development by Jonathan Zdziarski, published by O'Reilly Media Inc., is 280 pages and has a retail price of $39.99. We give iPhone Open Application Development a rating of 3 out of 5.

OUR RATING: 3 of 5