Beginning Xcode®

Chapter 9. Help and Documentation

Modern operating systems are staggering in their size and complexity. The sheer quantity of application program interfaces (APIs) available to a developer can be overwhelming at times. There are scores of frameworks and libraries, each consisting of literally thousands of classes, methods, functions, and constants. Often, just finding the correct method or constant can be your most difficult programming task.

To help you navigate this jungle of symbols, Xcode provides integrated help and documentation. You can browse and search developer documentation All of the major APIs are indexed, allowing you to call up the documentation for any symbol almost instantly.

Help and Documentation Window

The main interface for all Xcode help is the Help and Documentation window, which this chapter simply refers to as the help window. There are various ways of opening it, but the simplest is to choose the Help

The help window, shown in Figure 9-1, has four panes. On the left are the Search Groups and Bookmarks panes. On the right are the search results list and the documentation browser. "Browser" is somewhat of a misnomer because the pane is really just an editor pane. But documentation is inevitably in HTML or RTF format and is not normally writable (notice the padlock icon in the upper-right corner). Consequently, the pane almost always displays HTML-formatted text ...