The Safari-exclusive applications for iPhone and iPod touch assemble various elements, and this book shows you how to integrate these elements with key design concepts and principles in order to develop a highly usable interface for the touch screen. You'll learn to use existing open-source libraries in your code, imitate the overall look and feel of built-in Apple applications, and migrate existing Web 2.0 apps and sites to this new mobile platform. By the end of the book, you'll feel untouchable as you create a custom mobile application from scratch. CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
Richard Wagner, the former chief architect of NetObjects ScriptBuilder and the primary author of the ECMAScript Components standard, is currently in charge of development tools at Nombas, Inc.
This book is about writting web apps for mobile Safari. It is not about iPhone SDK, Objective-C nor Cocoa Framework. If you know HTML, CSS and JavaScript this book will bore you a little and you will find yourself skipping over pages of very detailed step by step explanation to write unordered list and asigning it some class attribute.
But if you want to write website or web apps for iPhone/iPod touch then this book is a good reference. Since its' publication a lot of new frameworks and libraries been developed that make this book obsolete. So I would not recommend reading this book and find more up to date references for mobile website development.
It's a nice, well-written book, however it suffers from a little aging, and too much focus on the Apple platform.
Not that there's anything wrong with targeting Apple devices primarily, but as an implementer I really want to know if I am selling myself short on support for other platforms. Unfortunately, with this book you will be lead down a garden path. If you follow all the advice, what you build will work nicely on the iPhone, iPod touch (and even iPad), but much of the code breaks irretreivably on most desktop and non-Apple-mobile browsers.
This book uses solely the iUI CSS framework by Joe Hewitt to build the websites to look like iphone apps. But it goes beyond just using the framework, it also explain the framework and how to extend it for your advanced use.