I am a “Learning Cocos2D” fanboy.
A few weeks ago I began learning iOS game development and immediately began researching open source game engines. The two frontrunners were Sparrow and Cocos2D. It became apparent fairly quick that Cocos2D stood out as the ultimate choice for my first game, based on longevity, community, documentation and depth of features. Sparrow is no slacker, but I knew that I wanted physics and collision, and Cocos2D comes prepackaged with Box2D and Chipmunk templates, so rock!. On install, Cocos2D generates 3 templates for XCode to use; a simple Hello World template, and a Box2D based and a Chipmunk based template. All three templates generate the appDelegate and all initial classes and configurations for you.
A few days later I saw that the book pictured to the left was recently released, “Learning Cocos2D” by Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich. Being the instant gratification buyer that I am I instantly downloaded it to the Kindle app on my iPad and began to dig in. Within the first two chapters I was sold, and honestly impressed with the amount of quality information. They actually get into explaining each line of code generated by the Cocos2D templates, describe the Director singleton, scenes and layers, and more. Fast forward to Friday of last week and I happened to see a tweet from Ray about a physical giveaway for the book from Chuck Toporek, Senior acquisitions editor with Addison-Wesley. I retweeted Chuck and about 15 minutes later saw a tweet where I had won, woot!
Chuck instantly DM’d me to get my physical address and one business day later I had the book in the mail, seriously that is how it’s done folks. The coolest part is that Chuck, Rod and Ray are all presenting at 360|iDev in Denver on September 11-14, and I am heading out there for the conference / good CO beer. You can rest assured that I will be in their sessions, taking notes and reporting back here on my blog. So, in short, if you are thinking about getting into iOS game development, check out Cocos2D and buy this book!