Objective-C® For Dummies®

Introduction

When the folks at Wiley Publishing approached me about writing Objective-C For Dummies, I thought long and hard about it. Within 480 pages, I wanted to be sure that I could explain to someone with no programming experience how to actually create useful programs.

So I started to think about what makes programming so difficult.

It isn't the concept of how programs work, which I cover easily in Part I. And it isn't really the language itself (or the instruction set — I cover that in Chapter 4). It isn't even the user interface — all that code needed to open and close windows, process menus and the mouse and user touches, draw graphics, and play audio and video (did I leave anything out?). No, while all that used to be really hard, now it's made much easier by using the frameworks available on the Mac and iPhone.

What is really hard, after you've learned the language and framework, is how you structure your program. How you actually go about taking your idea for an application and turning it into a robust Objective-C application.

Learning to use the tools is (relatively) easy; knowing how to use them to create a useful application is the real challenge.

So besides explaining the instruction set and everything else involved with coding, what I do along the way is explain the other things you need to know (things like application architecture and design). Those things that will make it possible for you, when you are done with this book, to go out and start developing your first ...