Reading This Book

The best programming books hit the ground running, and that’s just what we’ll do. Each chapter will introduce one concept and build a sample application around it. This book is intended to be read sequentially: every subsequent chapter builds on what we covered in the previous. We’ll start off with the basics, such as how to draw boxes on the screen, but in just a handful of chapters we’ll be interacting with an HTTP API. That means we move fast and cover just the essentials.

This isn’t a reference manual for iOS development; there are many other great and extensive resources on iOS development, including Apple’s official documentation. Instead, this book will get your feet just wet enough in the major topics of native iOS development so you can understand and research new information on your own.

Before we begin, you should be aware of some requirements. Since we plan on moving fast, this book assumes you’re familiar with Ruby. If you haven’t played around with Ruby, check out a book like Missing bibliography entry for pine:ltp before diving into RubyMotion. RubyMotion is currently a commercial product from HipByte; that means if you want to play, you have to pay for a license. Additionally, the RubyMotion tools work only on OS X 10.7 or newer. The iOS SDK ships with a fast desktop simulator, so you won’t need a physical iOS device to test your projects on.