Pro Core Data for iOS: Data Access and Persistence Engine for iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch (Books for Professionals by Professionals) [ペーパーバック]

This is the second book on Core Data that I've read. The first being Marcus Zarra's Core Data from PragProg. I would say this book is on-par with Marcus's book. They're both great and worth the read, if you're trying to learn Core Data.

With Pro Core Data, I like the fact that the authors pull no punches about the fact that Core Data is not an easy subject matter. They're pretty up front that the concepts are hard to understand and take awhile to digest. So many books will take the attitude of "you've got it, right?", otherwise you must be a dummy.

Pro Core Data gives a nice introduction to the Core Data topic for the uninitiated in roughly the first 50 or so pages. You'll want to follow along on your Mac and Xcode, if this is new to you. This isn't the type of book you read cover-to-cover, you must follow the examples and do the material, otherwise it'll be lost on you.

The book offers a great explanation and understanding of how SQLite is working behind the scenes when used as a persistent store. I particularly like the Data Model section and working with the Data Modeler in Xcode and how to effectively use the toolset. Good stuff, as I believe the Apple documentation is a little bit lacking in this area.

Filtering, aggregating, sorting, etc... are covered in fairly great detail and that's comforting for those that have an SQL background and are a bit confused about how to do those tasks with "objects". Performance tuning & memory usage is also covered nicely, with a particularly nice section detailing how to effectively use Instruments with your application.

A tricky part of any data-based application is handling upgrades and migrations, Pro Core Data does an effective job at covering the best practices, mapping data models, etc... to ensure a smooth transition between versions.

A suggestion for future versions would be to have more graphics (screenshots) of the application(s) being built. Knowing what you're building (i.e. seeing before doing) can help re-enforce the concepts and help define the bigger picture.
I definitely recommend this book to any iOS developer thinking about learning Core Data to add to their skills set.

I hate that no effort was taken to make the kindle edition readable. The code snippets are just dumped in bold with zero formatting and simple code snippets span multiple likes because the code dump to the ebook had a pointless large margin. Trying to read in this format gives me a headache and I consider it unusable and unreadable.

The title of the book is very misleading. It really should be called "Beginners Guide to Core Data for iOS". There's hardly any content here which would be considered "Pro". You're better off buying the "More iPhone Development" book (also from Apress publishing) ... the first 7 chapters of that book cover Core Data in more detail than this book does in its entirety. I wasted my time with this one.