Reccomendations for iPhone development texts
Howdy,
There's no way I can go to CA for the weekend, sad...
I have been developing an app for iPhone (
http://www.BibleXpress.net) and I've never done web development before, just Cocoa development. I have found some texts that are great:
All from O'Reilly, they're the books with animals on the covers.
Learning Javascript (only just a few typos) (Shelley Powers)
CSS, The Definitive Guide (Eric Meyer)
Programming PHP (Rasmus Leydorf, et al...)
In just three days, I've learned how to write CSS page layout, javascripts to configure dynamic pages, and php server-side components all linked together with AJAX (XMLHTTPRequest object). You can take a look at the public-accessible version of my site without logging in. The feature set will grow quickly over the next months when my roommate who does professional web development moves in
I'm still looking for a good HTML book, (my local Barnes & noble doesn't have O'Reilly's good book on it or MySQL). Don't fall for the O'Reilly books that say "Head First..." they're no good.
I think what newbies need to know is this:
HTML is what the browser will display, but CSS is a way to not only predefine styles for the HTML, but also predefine positioning, etc... CSS is just an easy way to make really great looking pages without complicated tables and formatting.
Javascript runs in the browser and allows you to dynamically change the contents of the page and also respond to user actions, like clicking on stuff. Javascript can be turned on and off in the browser.
.php runs on the server, and you can get the .php software from free websites that can run inside the Mac's built-in Apache webserver. Don't listen to the stuff about configuring from the command line if you're new, search for the "self-installing binary."
If you've never done a wesite before, you'll need a hosting service, and to buy a domain if you're not hosting from your own stuff. I'm using
http://www.godaddy.com. Make sure your host supports .php if you need to use it. goDaddy only supports .php on their Linux servers.
I also highly recommend Adobe Creative Suite for creating amazing graphics and then saving them in ultra-compact format for the web.