Another year has come and gone, which means it's time for us to look back at 2011 and see what happened. This year marks the fifth anniversary of Switch On The Code and so far every year has been better than the last.

In February we saw our first ever month of 500k pageviews, and for the most part traffic has held steady ever since. We ended the year with an amazing 5.6 million pageviews - a 10% increase over the previous year.

Learning to program is hard and one of the ways to make the process easier is by reading and using books. With our book reviews here at Switch On The Code we try to help you figure out which books are the best for any level of developer. In this review I'm going to go over the iOS game programming book Learning Cocos2D - A Hands-On Guide to Building iOS Games with Cocos2D, Box2D, and Chipmunk. written by Rod Strougo and Ray Wenderlich.

A few weeks ago, we here at Paranoid Ferret released a physics based puzzle game named Drop & Lock. It is not only fun, but extremely addicting. We would just like to take a quick break and tell (and show) you all the cool things that this new iPhone puzzler has to offer.

For the last few years we've been using a dedicated server for all of our hosting needs, but recently we decided to choose something a little more flexible and extensible and Amazon's EC2 seemed like a perfect fit. Amazon offers a free micro instance for a year, so off we went - building our latest project. It wasn't until the server started getting a little use that we noticed something important - a micro instance could end up costing us a significant amount of money.