Learning iPhone Game Programming - Book Review

Mike over at 71 Squared is currently writing a book on "Learning iPhone Game Programming". Most programming books teach you how to perform specific tasks like playing a sound or displaying an image. What separates this book from the rest is that it takes you through the entire development process of designing and writing a game for the iPhone. Everything from tips on how to come up with the initial concept of the game through to performance tuning & beta testing.

Mike's publishers have recently been in contact with me and asked if I'd be interested in reviewing his book. Of corse, I jumped at the chance! It's quite a tight schedule with the deadline being March 16. But on the plus side, the book will be out for you to get your hands on real soon!

The best part (in my opinion) is he's using TBXML to parse XML configurations to set up his tile map and particle emitter classes ;)

Go check out the latest news on this fab book: http://www.71squared.com/2010/02/book-update/

TBXML Pro

I have started work on TBXML Pro!

TBXML Pro will be a chargeable version of TBXML and will contain most of the following features

UTF-16 / UTF-32 Support and Auto Detection
This allows TBXML to correctly decode file formats other than UTF-8 that contain foreign character sets like Chinese characters.


Automatic Class Generation Based on an XML Doc
This will be a tool that you can use to generate a bunch of Objective-C classes for parsing the given XML file. This can be a massive time saver, saving you from the laborious task of writing all the code parse a specific XML layout.

Basic Error Handling
I would like to include some kind of error detection wile parsing a file to help isolate the source of parsing issues.

Built in XML Browser
A built in XML Browser so you can easily browse the contents of an XML file on the iPhone.

Parse XML and return instantiated classes
This will parse an XML file and automatically instantiate a class based on the tag name if it exists. This makes it easier to parse a file as you don't actually need to write any code to parse the XML. Just design a bunch of classes, tell the parser to parse and receive back a load of instantiated classes based on your XML content.


Extensions for specific XML formats like RSS or ATOM
These will consist of a bunch of classes designed to parse a specific XML specification. For instance, if you need to parse an RSS feed, you just need to include the TBXML RSS Extension, give it a URL and display the results. You don't need to know how the RSS specification works inorder to parse and extract the data.


An Assembler Based Core
I may add an optimised core written in pure assembly, just to make TBXML even faster ;)