The book gives a fair overview of the Core Animation framework, and helps to get you through some of the less intuitive parts. It quickly walks you through a few different examples of developing animation apps for the mac and then explains the differences and limitations of writing for the iPhone. I would also suggest reading through the apple docs which will help you understand some of the other tools available to you and also read more details on what you are working with.

Its a quick read, coming in at only 200 pages, and a lot of those pages are full-page images. Personally, I was hoping for a more thorough review and examples for the iPhone, and was dissapointed that there are only like 14 pages in the iPhone chapter, and 7 of them are a full page of a single image. (I think that might have something to do with the time the book was written and the state of the NDA for iPhone developers, but still I was disappointed).  You can get the pdf directly from the PragmaticProgrammers site, but you might want to check Amazon too.

Overall, I think the book gives a decent start to some animation concepts, and ways to improve your iPhone apps, but you might want to hold off on getting it now, and work your way through the existing docs and other sites first. I suspect the next generation of docs on this topic will have a much deeper review and will be worth the wait.

Now I’m looking for something that can give me a good overview of using OpenGL for the iPhone or something like Blender or Unity3d.