Learn Objective-C on the Mac (eBook)

Scott Knaster is a legendary Mac hacker and author of such bestselling books as Hacking Mac OS X Tiger and Macintosh Programming Secrets. His book How to Write Macintosh Software was required reading for Mac programmers for more than a decade.

Hello 17
Before You Start 17
Where the Future Was Made Yesterday 18
What’s Coming Up 18
Summary 19
Extensions to C 20
The Simplest Objective-C Program 20
Deconstructing Hello Objective-C 23
Are You the Boolean Type? 28
Summary 33
Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming 34
It’s All Indirection 35
Using Indirection in Object-Oriented Programming 45
Time Out for Terminology 57
OOP in Objective-C 58
Summary 70
Inheritance 71
Why Use Inheritance? 71
Inheritance Syntax 76
How Inheritance Works 79
Overriding Methods 83
Summary 86
Composition 87
What Is Composition? 87
Accessor Methods 92
Extending CarParts 98
Composition or Inheritance? 99
Summary 100
Source File Organization 101
Split Interface and Implementation 101
Breaking Apart the Car 105
Using Cross-File Dependencies 107
Summary 114
More About Xcode 115
Changing the Company Name 116
Using Editor Tips and Tricks 117
WritingYour Code with a Little Help from Xcode 119
Getting Information 135
Debugging 137
Cheat Sheet 143
Summary 144
A Quick Tour of the Foundation Kit 145
Some Useful Types 146
Stringing Us Along 148
Mutability 153
Collection Agency 155
Family Values 165
Example: Looking for Files 168
Summary 173
Memory Management 174
Object Life Cycle 175
Autorelease 180
The Rules of Cocoa Memory Management 184
Summary 190
Object Initialization 191
Allocating Objects 191
Initializing Objects 192
Isn’t That Convenient? 195
More Parts Is Parts 196
Car Cleaning, GC Style 205
The Designated Initializer 207
Initializer Rules 212
Summary 212
Properties 213
Shrinking Property Values 214
Objecting to Properties 220
Summary 227
Categories 228
Creating a Category 228
Splitting an Implementation with Categories 232
Making Forward References with Categories 237
Informal Protocols and Delegation Categories 238
Summary 245
Protocols 246
Formal Protocols 246
Carbon Copies 248
Objective-C 2.0 Goodies 257
Summary 258
Introduction to the AppKit 259
Making the Project 259
Making the AppController @interface 262
Interface Builder 263
Laying Out the User Interface 266
Making Connections 268
AppController Implementation 272
Summary 274
File Loading and Saving 275
Property Lists 275
Encoding Objects 279
Summary 286
Key-Value Coding 287
A Starter Project 287
Introducing KVC 290
A Path! A Path! 291
Aggregated Assault 292
Life’s a Batch 300
The Nils Are Alive 302
Handling the Unhandled 302
Summary 304
NSPredicate 305
Creating a Predicate 306
Fuel Filters 308
Format Specifiers 309
Hello Operator, Give Me Number 9 311
SELF Sufficient 314
String Operations 315
Like, Fer Sure 316
That’s All, Folks 316
Coming to Objective-C from Other Languages 317
Coming from C 318
Coming from C++ 319
Coming from Java 324
Coming from BASIC 326
Coming from Scripting Languages 326
Summary 327
Index 328