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Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook
Written in a cookbook style, this book offers solutions using a recipe-based approach. Each recipe contains step-by-step instructions followed by an analysis of what was done in each task and other useful information. The cookbook approach means you can dive into whatever recipes you want in no particular order. This book is an essential for any developer who possesses some JavaScript or web development knowledge and wishes to take a leap into building native applications for both the iPhone and Android. No knowledge of Objective C and Java is required.
--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
308 pages, Unknown Binding
First published December 11, 2011
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
April 2, 2012
The first time I held an iPhone, I had a desire to build iPhone apps as a hobby. My bachelor's degree was in computer science; however, I've always been more web focused in my programming. I considered myself closer to a true web designer, who happened to have a touch of technical abilities.
I dove deep into learning Objective C. In college, we learned C, C++, and Java. So I thought nothing of Objective C. My programming arrogance got the best of me. Building iPhone apps was going to take much more from me in personal resources than I was able to offer to this hobby.
I nearly gave up, until I discovered a way to build iPhone apps using nothing more than HTML, CSS and Javascript. That was stuff that I knew inside out.
The platform I discovered that allowed me to build iPhone apps is Appcelerator's Titanium. With minimal effort, I was able to get in and build a simple app in far less time than what it took me using Objective C. Granted, it was a primitive, simple app but it offered me hope that my ideas could be implemented into a more advanced app.
Titanium actually publishes your code into the appropriate platform's native language for you. So your HTML, CSS and Javascript end up being published as a native iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, or (get this) Android app.
The major obstacle that I faced was the lack of good documentation with Titanium. It seemed that some sections had a decent amount of documented methods, and example snippets, while other areas completely left off mention of all of the available methods and examples on how to use those methods. Titanium offers reasonable support, but for a price.
I recently came across a book that I wished was written when I first started this journey. It would have shaved months off of my discovery phase, maybe even a year. The book, written by Boydlee Pollentine, Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook, is an absolute must for those wanting to learn how to code apps using Titanium, and even those already developing with Titanium looking to strengthen their skills and increase their productivity.
Being in the computer science and web world, I've grown to hate/love programming cookbooks. They are good resources to use to look up coding snippets; however, they are often brutal to read from cover to end. While I do not consider myself to be a good writer (see above), I really find it difficult to read books written by hardcore IT people. They read like IT books probably should read; however, that style is not for me.
Fortunately, Boydlee's book is not one of these books. I was amazed at how easy to read the book was. The author was able to answer questions that I had about Titanium in minutes. These were questions that I spent months researching with little to no luck.
The book opened up pointing out how most books start by explaining the fundamental principles of the language, and focus on the architecture and syntax, to which the author tells us "Yawn... We're not going to do that. Instead, we will be jumping straight into the fun stuf...". And fun stuff it was. I truly enjoyed reading this book.
It walks you through the beginnings of just getting everything setup on your computer - and trust me, for iOS development, this is NO easy task.
The author takes you from simple text fields, and button how-tos to complicated Google Map and GPS integration. Most beginner books are too simple, while other books require nothing short of a PhD in computer science to understand. Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook has found a solid balance, meeting the needs of Joe Beginner, to Johnny iPhoneAppExpert.
The examples in the book are not your typical "Hello World!" examples that you would find in your programming 101 books. These are applicable, out of the book and into your app examples. Want to create drag and drop graphics? It's in there. How about integration with Facebook and Twitter? Yep, in there. Surely it doesn't cover using your device's camera and video features. Why yes it does. In all seriousness, the author does a great job including examples that most organizations would want to use in their app.
I have already started to incorporate things learned from this book into some of our upcoming apps. I highly recommend this book to anyone just starting, or wanting to dig deeper into the work of Titanium!
I dove deep into learning Objective C. In college, we learned C, C++, and Java. So I thought nothing of Objective C. My programming arrogance got the best of me. Building iPhone apps was going to take much more from me in personal resources than I was able to offer to this hobby.
I nearly gave up, until I discovered a way to build iPhone apps using nothing more than HTML, CSS and Javascript. That was stuff that I knew inside out.
The platform I discovered that allowed me to build iPhone apps is Appcelerator's Titanium. With minimal effort, I was able to get in and build a simple app in far less time than what it took me using Objective C. Granted, it was a primitive, simple app but it offered me hope that my ideas could be implemented into a more advanced app.
Titanium actually publishes your code into the appropriate platform's native language for you. So your HTML, CSS and Javascript end up being published as a native iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch, or (get this) Android app.
The major obstacle that I faced was the lack of good documentation with Titanium. It seemed that some sections had a decent amount of documented methods, and example snippets, while other areas completely left off mention of all of the available methods and examples on how to use those methods. Titanium offers reasonable support, but for a price.
I recently came across a book that I wished was written when I first started this journey. It would have shaved months off of my discovery phase, maybe even a year. The book, written by Boydlee Pollentine, Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook, is an absolute must for those wanting to learn how to code apps using Titanium, and even those already developing with Titanium looking to strengthen their skills and increase their productivity.
Being in the computer science and web world, I've grown to hate/love programming cookbooks. They are good resources to use to look up coding snippets; however, they are often brutal to read from cover to end. While I do not consider myself to be a good writer (see above), I really find it difficult to read books written by hardcore IT people. They read like IT books probably should read; however, that style is not for me.
Fortunately, Boydlee's book is not one of these books. I was amazed at how easy to read the book was. The author was able to answer questions that I had about Titanium in minutes. These were questions that I spent months researching with little to no luck.
The book opened up pointing out how most books start by explaining the fundamental principles of the language, and focus on the architecture and syntax, to which the author tells us "Yawn... We're not going to do that. Instead, we will be jumping straight into the fun stuf...". And fun stuff it was. I truly enjoyed reading this book.
It walks you through the beginnings of just getting everything setup on your computer - and trust me, for iOS development, this is NO easy task.
The author takes you from simple text fields, and button how-tos to complicated Google Map and GPS integration. Most beginner books are too simple, while other books require nothing short of a PhD in computer science to understand. Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook has found a solid balance, meeting the needs of Joe Beginner, to Johnny iPhoneAppExpert.
The examples in the book are not your typical "Hello World!" examples that you would find in your programming 101 books. These are applicable, out of the book and into your app examples. Want to create drag and drop graphics? It's in there. How about integration with Facebook and Twitter? Yep, in there. Surely it doesn't cover using your device's camera and video features. Why yes it does. In all seriousness, the author does a great job including examples that most organizations would want to use in their app.
I have already started to incorporate things learned from this book into some of our upcoming apps. I highly recommend this book to anyone just starting, or wanting to dig deeper into the work of Titanium!
March 13, 2012
I was recently fortunate enough to receive a review copy of "Appcelerator Titanium Smartphone App Development Cookbook" by Boydlee Pollentine from Packt Publishing. This book was timely for me as I'm seeing a lot of interest by my clients in mobile development. You see, a lot of them have their applications (some of which I designed) that have been running for over a decade at their office and have tons of data accumulated. They're not about to write a new application for their desktop as long as the current one is running, but they'd love to get access to their data on a new mobile platform. It's imperative that I learn this skill, and this book was extremely helpful.
This book calls itself a "cookbook," and divides itself up into recipes. For example the very first recipe creates a basic app and shows the controls. The second recipe creates an `ajax' type application that grabs data from a web service and displays it in tables and stores it in SQLite. The third recipe creates an app that uses Google maps and location services.
This books has a nice flow, so reading this book straight through gives an excellent tutorial and overview on how to develop mobile applications. At the same time this "cookbook" setup also allows you to quickly ascertain and implement just the feature you may need at any given time. So this book works as a tutorial as well as a reference. At some points the author challenges you by asking you to do things that were done in previous chapters, which detracts from the ability to strictly use this book as a reference.
My previous mobile development had been with PhoneGap, using Eclipse. Using Titanium Studio was a similar good experience. It's very quick and the Intellisense for the Titanium libraries is excellent. It's missing some features that Eclipse and Visual Studio have, but it's not too bad.
iPhone development must be done on a Mac because it uses the Apple SDK (yes, I know there are ways around this but they're a waste of your time), this book emphasizes Macs and iPhones a little, but there are ample screen shots for Android and the examples will work w/ Android just fine. Care is taken to point out distinctions between platforms.
No time at all is spent on how to install Titanium Studio or the requisite SDKs.. Is that a good thing? I kind of like that the book didn't take the space to reprint someone else's instructions, and just start right in with developing an app.
One downside of the book is that I have the electronic version of this book, and copying and pasting code examples from the book threw out carriage returns and made it necessary to reformat my code. But as it turns out, the examples in the book aren't always accurate or match the example code that's included. That sample code is excellent and mostly works very well, so I'd ignore the specifics of the code in the book and grab the code from the example files.
This book does a good job explaining why you're doing things the way you're doing them and suggests best practices when appropriate. It also suggests good ways of debugging when things go wrong.
If you're interested in this book and want to see some more, check out a Sample Chapter.
The quibbles I have with the printed code and out-of-date links and screenshots are not nearly enough to prevent me from recommending this book to any developer, like me, that doesn't want to learn Objective-C and Java in order to develop Android or iPhone applications. And even though the title says "Smartphone," this book works just fine for tablet development as well.
This book calls itself a "cookbook," and divides itself up into recipes. For example the very first recipe creates a basic app and shows the controls. The second recipe creates an `ajax' type application that grabs data from a web service and displays it in tables and stores it in SQLite. The third recipe creates an app that uses Google maps and location services.
This books has a nice flow, so reading this book straight through gives an excellent tutorial and overview on how to develop mobile applications. At the same time this "cookbook" setup also allows you to quickly ascertain and implement just the feature you may need at any given time. So this book works as a tutorial as well as a reference. At some points the author challenges you by asking you to do things that were done in previous chapters, which detracts from the ability to strictly use this book as a reference.
My previous mobile development had been with PhoneGap, using Eclipse. Using Titanium Studio was a similar good experience. It's very quick and the Intellisense for the Titanium libraries is excellent. It's missing some features that Eclipse and Visual Studio have, but it's not too bad.
iPhone development must be done on a Mac because it uses the Apple SDK (yes, I know there are ways around this but they're a waste of your time), this book emphasizes Macs and iPhones a little, but there are ample screen shots for Android and the examples will work w/ Android just fine. Care is taken to point out distinctions between platforms.
No time at all is spent on how to install Titanium Studio or the requisite SDKs.. Is that a good thing? I kind of like that the book didn't take the space to reprint someone else's instructions, and just start right in with developing an app.
One downside of the book is that I have the electronic version of this book, and copying and pasting code examples from the book threw out carriage returns and made it necessary to reformat my code. But as it turns out, the examples in the book aren't always accurate or match the example code that's included. That sample code is excellent and mostly works very well, so I'd ignore the specifics of the code in the book and grab the code from the example files.
This book does a good job explaining why you're doing things the way you're doing them and suggests best practices when appropriate. It also suggests good ways of debugging when things go wrong.
If you're interested in this book and want to see some more, check out a Sample Chapter.
The quibbles I have with the printed code and out-of-date links and screenshots are not nearly enough to prevent me from recommending this book to any developer, like me, that doesn't want to learn Objective-C and Java in order to develop Android or iPhone applications. And even though the title says "Smartphone," this book works just fine for tablet development as well.
February 23, 2012
I wish this book were available when I started developing in Titanium approximately a year ago. Though the Titanium site offers documentation and introductory videos, there’s really no substitute for seeing good solid sample code. Boydlee Pollentine provides some nice examples of common Titanium programming techniques, walks you through the code explaining each block, and provides screen shots of the resulting programs. If I had this book a year ago I would have been much more productive much faster.
I found the book very helpful for introducing me to parts of the API that I have not used, as well as showing me some of the finer points of the API that I have used. Of particular interest to me was the chapter on integrating with Google Maps and GPS, which I may need for a project later this year. Additionally, the sample on Yahoo!YQL was very interesting and something I hadn’t considered previously.
I would consider this is a must read for anyone starting to develop with Titanium, and recommended reading for intermediate Titanium developers.
I found the book very helpful for introducing me to parts of the API that I have not used, as well as showing me some of the finer points of the API that I have used. Of particular interest to me was the chapter on integrating with Google Maps and GPS, which I may need for a project later this year. Additionally, the sample on Yahoo!YQL was very interesting and something I hadn’t considered previously.
I would consider this is a must read for anyone starting to develop with Titanium, and recommended reading for intermediate Titanium developers.
March 19, 2012
a must read for anyone want to start developing mobile web apps using Appcelerator Titanium .
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews