Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or Cocoa

Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript: Making App Store Apps Without Objective-C or CocoaAuthor: Jonathan Stark
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
Category: Book

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Seller: sweethomeliquid2
Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars 24 reviews
Sales Rank: 14196

Media: Paperback
Edition: 1
Pages: 192
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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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Editorial Reviews:

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.



Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
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5 out of 5 stars What a great book!   September 3, 2010
hogsmill
This is a great book. Starts off by telling you pros and cons of native apps v html apps, then explains how to build HTML apps from scratch, and using jQTouch. Clear, easy to follow examples which are nicely broken down and explained.

I wrote an app in a couple of hours using this.


3 out of 5 stars Could have been so much better!   July 27, 2010
Ismail Elshareef (West Hollywood, CA United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful

First off, the title is completely misleading. Almost every chapter in the book covers how to build iPhone-specific web applications using HTML 5 and CSS3 specs. The last two chapters, and only the last two chapters, address converting these iPhone web apps into iPhone native apps using PhoneGap and then submitting them to the Apple Store. Even then, the information covered in these two chapters was rudimentary at best.

I probably shouldn't have had such high expectations, but the reputation of both the publisher and the author has always been stellar in my book. A title like, "Introduction to Building iPhone Web Apps and Converting Then to Native Apps using PhoneGap" would have properly prepared me for the content of the book. The content in and of itself is excellent--as an introduction, but nothing more.

So if you're interested in building iPhone web apps, this book is a great starting point. If you're interested in building iPhone native apps with web technologies, this book might be a letdown considering the level of your expertise developing iPhone web apps.


5 out of 5 stars Short but sweet   July 15, 2010
C. Holliday
This book really hit the sweet-spot for me. It covered all the topics I wanted to know more about but it kept things brief and to the point. I wish more authors would scale back on the blah blah blah and stick to the meat of the topic. Worth every penny.


2 out of 5 stars Limited information and already out of date.   July 3, 2010
Jeremy Deats
4 out of 5 found this review helpful

The book starts with a general overview of HTML and CSS and then explains how to use CSS, HTML and JQuery to target some of WebKit's proprietary calls to make Web Apps mimic native iPhone app look and feel. It also covers using HTML5 local storage. The last chapter explains how to use a new third-party (open source) PhoneGap SDK to convert your iPhone app to a native application.

So why two stars? Well, there are a few problems with the book. For starters, the pre-face and getting starting portion is not going to prepare anyone. If you don't have a foundation in HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc.. You're going to struggle with the content and the information in the first chapter is not going to be enough to help you. With the chapters that follow we get more step by step examples, far too much hand holding and NO SOURCE TO DOWNLOAD (this is unforgivable). Advanced developers will gladly pay for a book just to get their hands on the source and will learn quickly by reading the source code as opposed to reading the authors step-by-step instructions on how to write the source code. For all except beginner books, it's common with tech books that the source code is really what the reader is after and the book becomes a reference (as needed) for understanding the source code. This basic concept of tech book authorship seems to be missing here. This book is formatted as a beginners book but covers more advanced topic, this is a significant flaw in the approach.

Aside from my dislike of the authors approach, there are two other areas where I think this book should have been filled out a bit more. We get no information on using graphics. I know there are hundreds of books out there that cover graphics and animation with CSS/JavaScript, this author had an opportunity to give a chapter or two on this subject in the context of iPhone web app development; this is a huge opportunity missed. If you're looking to create a game app using the HTML/JScript stack to target iPhone this book will do you no good. With iOS4, Safari now supports a lot more of HTML5 which frankly changes a lot. It's not that the techniques covered in this book are all out of date, but there is a lot more that can be done now to make Web Apps mimic native iPhone apps. I realize tech books go out of date quickly, it's important you know this one has already been rendered obsolete in this way.

Finally, the last chapter covers PhoneGap. PhoneGap is an open source SDK that allows web developers to deploy their apps as native apps on many target mobile devices. In context of iPhone native app development, PhoneGap can only be used by developers with MacOS, XCode and the official iPhone dev SDK. It's useless to Windows and Linux developers for the purpose of creating native iPhone apps. Also, PhoneGap supports some really neat features like accelerometer events which this author does not even mention. This is another example of where if this book were just a bit thicker, it could have covered a lot more.

This is the first book I've purchased from O'Reily where I felt the book was a gimmick, written as an attempt to capitalize quickly on a hot subject matter. I can't think of any target audience that would really benefit here. I am very, very disappointed in O'Reily for allowing this one to get out the door. It's not that the author is incompetent, it's that he's not thorough on the subject and his book is not formatted for the advanced technical professional for which is was written.

The author does mention[...]. For the advanced developer (most people reading this book).
Download this library (currently in beta) and it will provide detailed examples of creating web apps the mimic iPhone look and feel. This free toolkit will quickly give you everything you need to know to do what this books aims to teach you and you will pay nothing for it.

[...]


5 out of 5 stars A fine programmer's guide   June 16, 2010
Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA)
Jonathan Stark's BUILDING IPHONE APPS WITH HTML, CSS, AND JAVASCRIPT offers a fine survey of mobile development tools and open source web technologies that can design and build apps for the iPhone and iPod touch without using Cocoa or Objective-C. Learn how to use various tricks to hook into advanced iPhone features with this fine programmer's guide.


Showing reviews 1-5 of 24
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