The Pragmatic Programmers, known for its line of programming titles in print and PDF form, have decided to shelve production of a planned book called iPhone SDK Development. In a news item posted to its web site, the company cited the iPhone SDK's non-disclosure agreement as the reason the book could not be published and made available to the public.

Though most developers and publishers expected Apple to lift the NDA after iPhone 2.0 firmware was release this July, Apple has yet to do so. "We had long internal debates: publish and be damned, or hold," founder Dave Thomas told Ars. "In the end, it came down to a question of principle. We expect people to honor our terms of use when they buy a PDF from us—not copy it, rip off the content, and so on—so it would be wrong of us to feel that we could ignore someone else's terms of use."

As many developers have already pointed out, not being able to have resources like programming books makes their task more difficult. "But all is not lost: we are actively looking at alternative ways of getting this content to you," reads part of the note posted yesterday on Pragmatic's site. "It probably won’t happen anytime soon, but know that we are doing what we can." Hopefully, developers will have access to this and other resources, despite Apple's seeming unwillingness to lift the NDA.