Graphics and Animation on iOS by Vandad Nahavandipoor

Summary: code snippets for graphics manipulation

Graphics and Animation on iOS is another book devoted to iOS written by Vandad Nahavandipoor. He has also written iOS 4 Programming Cookbook. Graphics and Animation on iOS seems to be a supplement for iOS 4 Programming Cookbook. You can find here topics that are not covered in previous book. These topics touch the issues related to graphics manipulation within iPhone applications. Even though the book is not a typical Cookbook, it has similar style.

Book itself is rather thin. It covers just few topics. You will find here basics that most of programmers face sooner or later and it is addressed to people who start their experience with iOS development. That means, issues explained within the book are not very sophisticated. You will find here answers to commonly asked questions like: how do I draw something on the screen, how do I draw a text, how can I scale the image (shape), how can I rotate the image (shape), etc.

Graphics and Animation on iOS is a typical “learn by example” tutorial. Examples are very simple and supporting code makes running them as simple as copy-paste. One remark here. Copying examples from book into XCode doesn’t preserve formatting which means you have to manually reformat code within IDE. In fact, you mostly work with _single_ UIView method – drawRect throughout the book. Everything happens inside it. This is really nice.

Book has two drawbacks. First of all, title implies that both graphics and animation will be covered in, let’s say, equal proportion. This is not quite true. Animation related topics are like 10% of the whole book. Another issue is that I miss clipping related section – this is usually an issue when it comes to graphics related development.

In overall I think this book is really devoted to iOS beginners. On the other hand you can always use it as a handy snippets base with detailed explanation. What is really nice here is that code examples are really small and functional.

Product page:

O’Reilly: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449305673/
Amazon (in Books): Graphics and Animation on iOS: A Beginner’s Guide to Core Graphics and Core Animation
Amazon (Kindle): Graphics and Animation on iOS: A Beginner’s Guide to Core Graphics and Core Animation