Book 5: Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript

Creating a native iPhone application is a tedious task: you must learn a new, rather strange language (Objective-C) and get used to the iPhone API to produce a decent application.
Wouldn't you like to take a different approach like creating your application with tools and languages you already know? And if those tools are Javascript + HTML + CSS that would be really compelling, uh?
That's the deal with this book: it shows you how to accomplish the task of creating iPhone applications, (even native ones!) with familiar tools.

Author: Jonathan Stark
Valoration: 8 / 10
Length: 224 pages (est.)
Book website: http://building-iphone-apps.labs.oreilly.com/index.html
Download link: n/a: book can be read on-line, in HTML format from previous link

Jonathan Stark made a really good job with Building iPhone Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It is a concise book that starts with basics of Javascript, HTML & CSS to let everyone follow next chapters without a problem and advances to all necessary steps to create a mobile application.

Although the book is oriented to the creation of native iPhone apps using Javascript & Co, it serves also as a good resource for developing web pages for the iPhone, so it is recommended although you won't go the native way.

A thing I much appreciated is the use of a Javascript framework like jQuery thorough the code of the book: this makes it more clear and concise and, because of that, easier to read. The code examples are stylish and enjoyable. In fact, the code in this book is fun to read! Also worth to mention is the fact that the book is full of colorful screenshots in each chapter, that are very useful in this kind of books.

You may be wondering how can be created native apps with web tools and languages. Well, there is a trick: the book explains the usage of the jQuery's jQTouch plugin to ease web development on the iPhone (jQTouch provides animations, themes among other goodies). Then the book shows how to do client-side data storage (eh, every app needs to save data!) and introduces the reader to the PhoneGap platform. This is the sweet piece of the puzzle that makes the magic happen: PhoneGap is a cross-platform mobile platform, which offers an API to access features of mobile phones like GPS, contacts, messaging, etc. With PhoneGap you can develop your application once in Javascript, HTML and CSS and compile it to iPhone, Android or BlackBerry native applications, without having to learn 3 different proprietary API's to do the same.

The last part of Stark's book explains the process of submitting your before Javascript, now native application to Apple's App Store in great detail.