Recently, no starch press sent me a review copy of one of their newest books, My New iPhone, by Wallace Wang. It is one of their “My New” series, which helps new buyers of a gadget or piece of electronics with their initial steps to get acquainted with their new “toy”.
The book contains 52 chapters (called “projects”), with each project covering a different aspect of the iPhone. While the initial projects focus on the most basic operation such as operating the iPhone, sending text message and setting up email, the later projects cover the various applications and also some of the third party apps that can be downloaded from the AppStore. The book itself is not a rehash of the iPhone manual – instead, the author chose the projects format to start high-level, but then dig a bit deeper and end with an “Additional Ideas” section. Each project is well written and presented. To see for yourself, just download a sample chapter.
Since our blog covers photo and video on the iPhone, I immediately looked up the two photo sections. The author sufficiently covered snapping pictures, viewing them on the iPhone in all different manners, assigning them as wall-paper and even uploading them.
It is noteworthy that while the book covers iPhone 3.0, it does not cover the iPhone 3GS. Thus, there was no section on video. I hope no starch plans on releasing a second edition of the book.
Even for an advanced iPhone user like me, the book had quite a bit to offer. I liked three aspects of the book:
- If I needed to look up something in the hurry, I had no problems finding it via search in the eBook, And I already did so – something I had forgotten I easily found in the book.
- Since there are so many projects, the book covered aspects of the iPhone that I’ve yet to explore. One of them is using the iPhone as a radio, either through AOL or Pandora. I will definitely try that out
- Each projects ends with an “Additional Ideas” section where the author quickly outlines a few more things you could explore. Similar to above, I found tricks and apps in these sections that I was not aware of and thus I will download some of the covered apps
Overall, the book was a quick and good read for me. Its organization into chapters lends itself to both quick browsing and perusing a particular chapter in-depth. I can recommend it to anyone who plans on buying an iPhone or has not spend a lot of time with his/her iPhone.
440 pages. ISBN: 978-1-59327-195-4
Price: $29.95 in Softcover, $23.95 for the eBook bundle.
p.s.
Full Disclosure: no starch press is a sponsor of ours for the month of September, 2009.
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