Core Data iOS Essentials: Knowing Core Data gives you the option of creating data-driven iOS apps, and this book is the perfect way to learn as it takes you through the process of creating an actual app with hands-on instructions.

The English phrasings are awkward in various sections of the text. While the book describes its 2 inhouse reviewers, perhaps they ignored the grammatical aspects of the narrative. At the very least, a non-technical editor might have done a final run-through before it was sent to the printer.The book does not describe much about the graphical front end that you see in several screen captures. The code examples basically just give the minimal front end. Which is correct. Keep in mind that the focus is more on the backend, in a full Model-View-Controller pattern. The View part is the front end. Other books on iOS, like for gaming, emphasise those graphics.The text examples are extensive enough that you can understand the level of complexity likely needed in your applications. The 3 part nature of MVC necessitates this complexity, and it does mean that you might have to read more carefully to understand the logic than for a purely graphical application.As to how much detail the MVC deserved, this can be subjective. The amount of detail that the author furnished suffices to help a reader completely new to MVC, and indeed to the very idea of patterns. The book presents itself as covering the essentials; hence this, and it does seem an appropriate level of data and code snippets. Unfortunately, readers already versed in MVC on other platforms will just have to plough through what are to them extraneous details.

Whenever you start to develop an application it is just a matter of time when you decide that you need to save some data. No matter what will it be - settings for the application, list of the groceries in your TODO application, score achieved by the player during the game or some images. In that case, Code Data comes in handy. Core Data provides developer with an abstraction layer between GUI and datastore (whether it will be a flat file or SQLite database).Bintu Harwani tries to make this topic easier for the readers by providing the with the building process of the application that utilizes Core Data. At first, he goes over general, Core Data related, topics. He also presents target application that will be developed. Then, Objective-C content required for the application is explained - that is, protocols and Table View. After the indispensable introduction author jumps right into Core Data development.I, personally, prefer Cookbook like books, where certain topics are discussed without being bound to a particular topic too much. In this book different approach is presented. You are presented development process. In order to get as much as possible out of it you have to follow it from the start to the end. I think this approach is quite good for beginners where examples are more valuable than pure theory. In this terms I think that book might be useful for the beginners indeed. However, there are few drawbacks.First of all, book addresses iOS 3.0 while there is iOS 4.0 already heavily used and iOS 5.0 is already announced and ready for download for registered Apple iOS Developers. Basing on the XCode screen shoots I guess that XCode 3 was used instead of XCode 4. This may lead sometimes into confusion. You will see something different within book comparing to what you see on the screen. Another drawback is the way book is arranged. At least it is an issue for me. Within second chapter there is a section that describes applications behavior. This description goes over all the functionalities which is, for me, too detailed. I'd rather see just a brief description of application within section "Understanding Core Data" while at the same time I'd prefer to see details within chapters devoted to particular part of the application.I think that book can help readers to go through the basics of Core Data. I wouldn't recommend it for more advanced users that are looking for more sophisticated solutions within Core Data related area. But I think this is what title says. This book is about essentials, and in that case it is just fine.

Das Hauptproblem des Buches liegt darin, dass von der Tabelle bis zur GUI alles haarklein vorgekaut wird und man das Hauptthema ständig verlässt. Dem Autor gelingt es nie, einen Überblick zu schaffen, so dass man irgendwann sich verfahren hat und man einige Seiten vorher neu starten muss.Essential ist hier mal gar nichts, krudes, einfaches Datenmodell ohne Sinn, das Thema Normalisierung wird einfach unterschlagen.Nochmals: Nur weil man etwas kann, ist man nicht gleich Didakt und kann sein Wissen vermitteln.

I have been learning app development for a few months now with a background in procedural languages that I haven't touched for too many years. So I've been reading a LOT and using as many video tutorials as I can stand. I had started developing an app using SQLite but decided to investigate Core Data before I went any further. This was the book I chose because I wanted something that covered the basics with plenty of "hands on" exercises.Well... Let me start out by saying that I have not yet finished the book. I'm about half way through it. Let me also say that the book HAS helped me. I knew nothing and now I know something. So that can't be all bad.However...It's far from all good.A lot of the book deals with stuff that you really should know already. Adding classes, defining outlets, hooking things up in Interface Builder. Pages and pages of screenshots of IB that all do the same thing. It shouldn't be in this book. If you don't get the MVC concept already then you need to address that BEFORE you dig into Core Data NOT while you're learning it. It's as if the book was too small so they shoved in 50 or 60 pages of irrelevant screenshots and blurb about how to set up your viewControllers.The book has some questionable use of the English language. Nothing too dramatic but also nothing a decent Editor shouldn't have put right.But BY FAR the most annoying thing about the book is the code simply DOES NOT WORK properly. So I spend half and hour reading each of the last couple of chapters then a couple of hours re-reading the book, and re-reading my code to be sure it matches (which it does!) before going off to try and figure out what is wrong with it. So far successfully.Now I must say that I have come to xCode only in xCode4 which the book was obviously not written for. It could be that the code works perfectly well in xCode3 (but I doubt that because one of the errors appears to that a delegate is simply not declared a such in the examples). It's also possible that these are covered in the publishers website, but that doesn't excuse them being in the book in the first place.Also the layout chops and changes. Sometimes they put in a piece of code then put the title and explanation after it. Other times they put the title and explanation before the code excerpt. The second way works, the first way does not work and mixing the two is just... wrong, frankly.It feels a bit more like an instruction manual on "HOW to do things" rather than a learning aid telling you more about the "WHY you do things". There is a bit of "WHY" every so often and it can be quite good but it's all a bit shallow.It isn't the worst book I have read but it is far from the best. The extra time I have had to spend unraveling the bugs has maybe helped me as much as the actual content of the book. I might persevere with it but I find I approach each new chapter with the fear that it won't work and that I won't be able to figure out why.Bottom line: I can't recommend it. I'm running through the apple developer docs on the topic and they are clearer, better laid out, code works, covers at least as much ground and it's free (well it's free if you've paid the developer fees).This is just my experience with the text. I am pretty good at copying code from text and have been very thorough in reviewing each section and comparing my code to the text. It could be my mistakes that are causing my code not to work but having figured out the problem and then having re-reviewed the code in the book - I still can't see how it can work the way they have it.