Book Review: iOS 6 Programming Cookbook By Vandad Nahavandipoor, O'Reilly Media

I reviewed this book as part of the O'Reilly blogger program.  

The format of the book consists of concise recipes which state the problem and show how to implement a solution with easy to follow code samples.  I love how the e-book has code samples in color with syntax-highlighting, and I found that the code was easy to translate to use with the Ruby Motion framework.  Of course, the recipes work fine with native Cocoa as well.

Being a cookbook, I don't think this book was intended to be read cover to cover, although I did just that when reviewing it. You could do that as well, but it might serve you better to use it as a reference. The good thing is that this book is organized almost like a non-cookbook; i.e. it has beginner topics in the first chapter(s) and gets progressively more advanced as you go on.

Although iOS 7 is available now, I would still highly recommend this book.
Read more about this book on its product page.

Book Review: "The Book of CSS 3" by Peter Gasston

Disclaimer: As part of the O'Reilly Blogger Review Program, I chose to review this book.  More details can be found here.

The ideal audience for this book is a web developer who is familiar with CSS and has designed several websites.  In other words, you won't learn how to design a nice layout but you will learn all of the details about CSS 3.

The things I liked about this book are that there are numerous examples in every chapter, with pictures that demonstrate different CSS properties.  Of course, what good is a book about CSS without pictures?
Another thing that you will find useful is at the end of every chapter, Peter provides a chart outlining how well the major browsers support a particular feature.  

There aren't many bad things about this book.  My suggestion is that you do not read it cover to cover, as I believe it would be better used as a reference book.  The only other thing that I didn't like about this book is that the examples are in black & white; it would've been nice to see the images in color, especially in the PDF version of this book.

Overall, it’s a great book to get to learn how to implement the latest cool features in CSS 3.  The numerous examples in the book are very helpful, and it will serve as a great reference book to keep on your desk.