My introduction to the Head First Series was through their books on Java and Design Patterns. They were excellent and worked really well. Coming from there, I found this book very disappointing.



This book, under the pretext of complying with the Head First pedagogy, packs in illustrations that are irritating. It shows you how to do certain things but skips basic concepts that dictate why things work the way they do. The book also tries to cover too much ground too soon and missing some very important concepts on the way. What can be clearly explained in 5 pages is spread out to 50 pages with needless illustrations, cartoons, interviews and big fonts. Worse, the code is presented in bits and pieces spanning across multiple pages that the reader has to put in conscious effort to piece all of them together. The Head First books on Design Patterns, for example, had complete code presented without breaks. Head First books aren't reference books (they are not designed to be one). The Design Patterns book, for example, had a nice set of summary pages which presented UML diagrams for the entire pattern and all the code. So if one has to refresh his knowledge of a particular concept he just has to go to the last few pages of a particular chapter and things just fall in place. This book doesn't have a summary section at all. So it is very difficult to go back and figure things out.



After spending some frustrating time with this book, I got "Beginning iPhone 3 Development" by Jeff LeMarche/Dave Mark. What a refreshing change! To anybody starting on iPhone development, I suggest the book by LeMarche. Cocoa uses many Design Patterns, so I suggest that you pair it with the Head First Design Patterns book to get a solid grounding of concepts.



Head First series is great but this book just doesn't cut it.