Beginning iOS Programming: Building and Deploying iOS Applications

Chapter 2Introduction to Objective-C

WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER:

• An overview of Objective-C
• Declaring classes and instancing objects
• Memory management in Objective-C
• The Model-View-Controller design pattern
• Delegates and protocols in Objective-C
• Overview of blocks
• Error handling patterns in Objective-C

The first step to creating the Bands app is to learn about the language it will be written in, Objective-C. Objective-C is the programming language used to develop both Mac and iOS applications. It’s a compiled language, meaning that it gets compiled down to raw machine code as opposed to being interpreted at runtime. As its name implies, it’s based on the C programming language. It’s actually a superset of C that adds object-oriented programming methodologies. Because it’s a descendant of C, its syntax and concepts are similar to other C-based languages. In this chapter you learn the basics of Objective-C by comparing it to Java and C#.

EXPLORING THE HISTORY OF OBJECTIVE-C

Objective-C was developed in the early 1980s by a company called Stepstone. It was working on a legacy system built using C but wanted to add reusability to the code base by using objects and messaging. The concept of object-oriented programming (OOP) had been around for a while. The Smalltalk language developed by Xerox was the most prominent object-oriented language in use at the time. Objective-C got its start by taking some of the concepts and syntax of Smalltalk and adding it to C. This can ...