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Experiencing Pragmatic Programmers on the iPhone

April 1, 2009 by Rob Bazinet

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The recent announcement by the Pragmatic Programmers that they would have their books available in other formats besides PDF piqued my interest because I have a lot of their books in PDF today.  I was particularly encouraged by the iPhone support and wanted to give it a shot.

One of my latest projects it to learn Objective-C and become proficient as an iPhone developer, both for freelance work and some product ideas of my own.  So one book I wanted to try was the iPhone SDK Development book by Bill Dudney, Chris Adamson and Marcel Molina.  This is a great book with so much practical advice for the aspiring iPhone developer.  A word about the book, it does seem to lean toward folks who have had background in C++, C# or Java, which is perfect for me.

Setting Up

Pragmatic is providing three types of downloadable formats now; PDF, epub (iPhone) and mobi (Kindle).  Getting setup to read documents on the iPhone is pretty simple.

  1. The first thing to do is to install Stanza, the free ebook reader,  on the iPhone from the Apple App Store.
  2. Browse to the Pragmatic Programmers site from the iPhone and login to your account.
  3. Download the ebook you want from the site.
  4. Run Stanza on the iPhone and it will pick up the newly downloaded book. 
  5. Done.

Viewing the Results

Stanza loads up and lets you use gestures to move through the book, selecting the Table of Contents lets you choose which chapter to view.  Going from page-to-page is easy too with just a flick across the iPhone screen.  I was really amazed how good the quality of the text is:

IMG_0004

You can see the nice crisp letters on the white background are easy on the eyes.  Images also show very well:

IMG_0005

One area I was concerned about was view code. As you can see, code looks good too:

IMG_0006

Granted, the need to scroll may be annoying to some but it is acceptable to me.  The main goal for me it to actually read the text and not really focus on the code.  I don?t know how this would be with pages of complex Objective-C here but time will tell.

I am curious what type of battery life I will get with reading for long periods of time or how the reading experience will be over long periods either.  I guess I need a chance to use it for a while.

One nice thing about Stanza is they have over 100,000 books and periodicals available.  Sure, it is not a Kindle but the iPhone is already paid.

Technorati Tags: iPhone,eBooks,Stanza,Pragmatic Programmers

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Comments

  1. Articles about Ebooks as of April 1, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge says

    April 1, 2009 at 4:14 pm

    RE: Experiencing Pragmatic Programmers on the iPhone

    Pingback from Articles about Ebooks as of April 1, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge

  2. Articles about Ebooks as of Ap says

    April 1, 2009 at 4:14 pm

    RE: Experiencing Pragmatic Programmers on the iPhone

    Pingback from Articles about Ebooks as of April 1, 2009 | The Lessnau Lounge

  3. amber says

    April 1, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    I just found out the same thing myself. Also nice, is you can get the .mobi for the Kindle. Which I immediately downloaded all of my e-books once I heard Bill mention this on the late night cocoa podcast.
    H

  4. amber says

    April 1, 2009 at 8:35 pm

    I just found out the same thing myself. Also nice, is you can get the .mobi for the Kindle. Which I immediately downloaded all of my e-books once I heard Bill mention this on the late night cocoa podcast.

    H

  5. Rob Bazinet says

    April 1, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    @amber – It is actually pretty good on the iPhone. I don’t own a Kindle yet.

  6. Rob Bazinet says

    April 1, 2009 at 9:18 pm

    @amber – It is actually pretty good on the iPhone. I don’t own a Kindle yet.

  7. murphee says

    April 2, 2009 at 2:47 pm

    Hey Rob, thanks for the tip – I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages.
    I tried converting one of the PragProg PDFs to Stanza’s format, but most of the formatting and the images were lost. This is great;
    BTW O’Reilly books are also available for Stanza: toc.oreilly.com/…/how-to-read-ore

  8. murphee says

    April 2, 2009 at 2:47 pm

    Hey Rob, thanks for the tip – I’ve been waiting for something like this for ages.

    I tried converting one of the PragProg PDFs to Stanza’s format, but most of the formatting and the images were lost. This is great;

    BTW O’Reilly books are also available for Stanza: toc.oreilly.com/…/how-to-read-ore

  9. Rob Bazinet says

    April 3, 2009 at 7:42 am

    Werner, I was glad to see Pragmatic go this way, it really makes for pretty nice reading, at least for a phone.
    Thanks for the link, I will check out the O’Reilly stuff too, I have ton of their books.

  10. Rob Bazinet says

    April 3, 2009 at 7:42 am

    Werner, I was glad to see Pragmatic go this way, it really makes for pretty nice reading, at least for a phone.

    Thanks for the link, I will check out the O’Reilly stuff too, I have ton of their books.

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