One of the best iPhone reference books on the market today is iPhone SDK Development by Bill Dudney and Chris Adamson, published by Pragmatic Programmers. The examples are real-world, easy to follow and cover just about any area of development that one needs. In my earlier projects and example code I tended to use a lot of graphics for buttons and backgrounds because I need something with rounded corners and/or a gradient. However, in my latest project I have wanted to get away from that and utilize CoreAnimation and more UIView drawing techniques and the results have been outstanding. Load time on my views are much faster because all the drawing and rendering are done on the compiled view level and not from the rendering of an image.
I created a sample project that loads a three different views onto the controller and animates them. There is nothing overly complex about the code at all and can be customized to be more configurable, but is written to show the power and flexibility of creating custom views and animations.
::NOTE::
The rounded corner drawing in the project was sample code from the iPhone SDK Development Book. Credit where credit is due to Bill and Chris.
As always I encourage anyone who downloads the project to make any modifications and/or enhancements. For example, you could add in the functionality of firing of the animation based upon text field values or randomizing the speed of the animation.