Building iPhone OS Accessories: Use the iPhone Accessories API to Control and Monitor Devices (Books for Professionals by Professionals) 1st ed. Edition

After reading this book, I honestly think it's a waste of time. It's obvoius the author is an intellegent person but the chapters tend to jump from what seems to be novice topics to expert with little to no transition information. As well, I was not happy with how the book, as a whole, was organized.The author can't, and doesn't, really tell you HOW to get the app working with an External Accessory. At best, all he can do is tell you to join the Apple Developers program, and the Apple MFI program and where to go get the information. He give's very little code samples and does nothing to show how it's all put together.Even as a beginnig Apple programmer (I'm an electrical engineer), I learned little, if anything, from this book.

Awesome! Super excited to see an Accessories book come out. The ExternalAccessoriesFramework has been a sleeping giant for a year now waiting for enough momentum to really break out. I would really love to see a community of MFi companies releasing accessories with publicly available EA Protocols for any iPhone developer. I can totally see a future of one MFi company releasing a product that hundreds of apps/ app developers could use. Get a jump on the accessories gold rush (okay gold rush is wrong, maybe gold trickle) and become a master of the External Accessories framework. I have not completed the book yet. I'm just super excited that Apress has an accessories book available now!

Contrary to some other reviews about this book, I found that this was worth the time and money. The author thoroughly describes the External Accessory Framework, which is necessary for an accessory and iOS app to communicate. He also explains that he cannot give you the answer to everything because Apple requires that a partnership be made between your company and Apple (MFI certification) in order to receive some very important documentation. Without thoroughly reading this book and being patient, the reader may find this book to be a waste of time, but in reality the author gives you every answer he can. I gave this book a four star rating because it seemed that some topics in the book were unnecessary such as OOP concepts. Such topics should be left to an entirely separate book, in my opinion. Overall, this book was well written and for someone who is interested in making an iPhone accessory, it is a very handy book.

This book is a giant waste of time and money. He spends half the time talking about things that have nothing to do with software or hardware (such as whether manually programming serial numbers is feasible for a small business) and says nothing insightful or of any other value about the work at hand.He also seems to think that the reader has never written code before.Stay away.

First the caveat and context.Given the books title, I actually expected more focus on the hardware side. I assumed that most readers would already have at least an intermediate level of iOS development knowledge. I also purchased this book because I'm ineligible to join the elite "Made for iOS" group. The book makes it clear that it is about software.So while the book may be well written, it mismatched my expectations. And perhaps I should have expected that Apple's restrictive nature would severely limit the information.However, Ken does a super job about working around the hurdles and explaining the process by which one can build an iOS accessory.I just wish that Apple would make it easier for the creative hardware dev's to be creative.

This is apparently the only guide on the market about building iOS accessories, and it's unfortunate since this guide is so horribly out of date. This guide should be used as a "starting point" to get you off on the right foot, but don't expect to get much out of it unless you're planning on building an app for iPhone OS 2.