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Learning iPhone Programming
book

Learning iPhone Programming

by Alasdair Allan
March 2010
Beginner
374 pages
10h 57m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Learning iPhone Programming

Chapter 4. Coding in Objective-C

Thus far, you’ve built a simple iPhone application and discovered that it’s not that hard to build apps for the iPhone or iPod touch. Let’s step back and take a broader look at the Objective-C language.

Objective-C is an object-oriented language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to C. The language is a superset of the C language, providing constructs to allow you to define classes and objects. Once you get the hang of the Smalltalk-style syntax, if you’ve programmed in an object-oriented language before, things should look fairly familiar. However, there are some differences, and I discuss them in this chapter. One of the bigger differences, especially for those who are coming from a Java background, is in how Objective-C deals with memory management.

Declaring and Defining Classes

As is the case in almost all other object-oriented languages, in Objective-C classes provide the building blocks to allow encapsulation of data and methods that act on that data. Objects are specific instances of a class, and they contain their own instance data and pointers to the methods implemented by the class. Classes are specified in two pieces: the interface and the implementation. The interface contains the declaration of the class and is normally contained in a .h file. The implementation contains your actual code (the definition) and is normally contained in a .m file. We briefly discussed this in Chapter 3, but let’s take some time to look at it in more detail ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449380052Errata Page