What follows is the first post of three, reviewing the book Xcode 3 Unleashed, by Fritz Anderson.

I hope you’ll find the approach to this review to be informative, as it will definitely be different from other technical book reviews. Much longer than most book reviews, there is a good reason: to provide depth of information about the book, including quality and relevance of the examples/code, describe where the book shines, and also to point out areas for improvement.

I’ll take the time to read the book (cover to cover), work through numerous examples (as in, type in code, compile, run, etc) and share my insight from the perspective of someone who has been in the software business (as a techie) for nearly 20 years. As the author of a technical book, I’ll also be able to put myself in the shoes of the author, which I think can provide for some additional insight regarding what works and what doesn’t in a book. Once the review is complete, I’ll write one or two posts (tips) that are based on information from the book. Let’s get started.
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In the previous post (on the iPhone Developer Tips blog) I demonstrated a simple debug class that I wrote to wrap some additional code around NSLog. The code allows for displaying additional information beyond the date/time stamp and process ID that NSLog outputs, specifically, the filename which calls the debug routine, and the line number where the call was invoked. I also added a few additional configuration options including an option to disable all debug messages.

You can read the rest of the tip on the iPhone Developer Tips blog.

Coming from a C development background, long before the days of integrated debuggers, printf() was the primary tool for tracking down bugs. Building on that, NSLog is no doubt helpful. However, as the amount of code in a project grows, I often find that another reference point in the output would be helpful, namely, the filename and line number where the NSLog calls originate.

This is a two part series on creating a new class that wraps NSLog to add several additional debugging features including output of the filename/path, line number information and the option to turn debug messages off/on.

You can read the rest of the tip on the iPhone Developer Tips blog.

In building a recent project I encountered an error during the linking process. I want to point out the error message and show you how this simple error can be resolved. The reason for pointing out this error is that I have no idea why this error came about…more on that in a moment.

Read the rest of this tip on the iPhone Developer Tips blog…

I want to share another debugging tip, this something that applies to the final step of building an iPhone project, linking.

I was able to successfully compile a project that I’ve been working on, however, the build process generated an error that two symbols could not be found, CGRectZero and CGRectOffset.

The figure below shows the specific error messages (ignore the first error about .objc_class_name_BirdView for now).

Read the rest of this tip on the iPhone Developer Tips blog…

I recently ran into this error message within Xcode while writing an iPhone application. I was surprised how long it took to track this down. One of the reasons this is tricky is that message implies that the error occurred in the file referenced in the error message.

Read the rest of this tip on the iPhone Developer Tips blog…

If you’ve been reading the iPhone related tips on this site, you’ll want to point your browser to my new iPhoneDeveloperTips.com blog!

I’ll continue to write tips here as well, however, the primary focus of my career is now iPhone centric, so the bulk of my writing will focus on the iPhone.

To get things rolling on the iPhone blog, I have migrated the iPhone tips shown here to the new blog. If you are the author of any comments on iPhone tips that started on this site, and have a few minutes to spare, I would encourage you to copy/paste your comments onto the new blog.

For the iPhone developers in the crowd, I hope you find the new site a valuable resource.

John