Learning Objective-C 2.0: A Hands-On Guide to Objective-C for Mac and iOS Developers

9. Common Foundation Classes

Objective-C is a very compact language. Much of Objective-C’s power resides in its associated class libraries, called frameworks. The previous chapter covered the general topic of frameworks. In this chapter, we’ll look at several of the classes in the Foundation framework.

The Foundation framework provides classes for basic entities such as strings, arrays, dictionaries, and number objects. Although it is possible to write an Objective-C program that doesn’t use classes from the Foundation framework, using the Foundation classes rather than creating your own equivalent classes results in shorter development times and fewer bugs.

This chapter begins with some general information about Foundation classes that have ...