Mac® Application Development For Dummies®

Chapter 13

Ten Useful Apple Sample Apps

I began my adventures in programming when I was handed a book of source code, in the BASIC programming language, containing more than 100 games. This book was page after page of the computer instructions needed to program apps like roulette, blackjack, craps — apparently games of chance were a big hit — as well as mazes, puzzles, and other interesting and strange ways to explore what a computer program could do. The book did not go over theory, data structures, or anything remotely philosophical — object-oriented programming was still not mainstream. Most of the games worked as written, some required a workaround, and (of course) there was one that I never did get to run. But after reading through all the games, and trying to get them all to work, I learned the basics of programming from those examples. And so I learned the best lesson about programming: Sample Code.

Xcode does not come with code examples of the many different things you can implement within your apps. The Apple Developer website, however, provides hundreds of examples of sample Mac app code that you can download and get up and running on your development machine. When you search the Developer Library for Core Data, for example, your search will return Sample Code resources, in addition to Tutorials and Guides about Core Data. The website delivers a great deal of material on each sample app. You can look at all the code through web pages without having to download the app; ...