As a courtesy, this is a full free rendering of my book, Programming iOS 6, by Matt Neuburg. Copyright 2013 Matt Neuburg. Please note that this edition is outdated; the current books are iOS 13 Programming Fundamentals with Swift and Programming iOS 13. If my work has been of help to you, please consider purchasing one or both of them, or you can reward me through PayPal at http://www.paypal.me/mattneub. Thank you!

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Preface  Table of Contents  Chapter 1. Just Enough C

Part I. Language

Apple has provided a vast toolbox for programming iOS to make an app come to life and behave the way you want it to. That toolbox is the API (application programming interface). To use the API, you must speak the API’s language. That language, for the most part, is Objective-C, which itself is built on top of C; some pieces of the API use C itself. This part of the book instructs you in the basics of these languages:

  • Chapter 1 explains C. In general, you will probably not need to know all the ins and outs of C, so this chapter restricts itself to those aspects of C that you need to know in order to use both Objective-C and the C-based areas of the API.
  • Chapter 2 prepares the ground for Objective-C, by discussing object-based programming in general architectural terms. It also explains some extremely important words that will be used throughout the book, along with the concepts that lie behind them.
  • Chapter 3 introduces the basic syntax of Objective-C.
  • Chapter 4 continues the explanation of Objective-C, discussing the nature of Objective-C classes, with emphasis on how to create a class in code.
  • Chapter 5 completes the introduction to Objective-C, discussing how instances are created and initialized, along with an explanation of such related topics as polymorphism, instance variables, accessors, self and super, key–value coding, and properties.

We’ll return in Part III. Cocoa to a description of further aspects of the Objective-C language — those that are particularly bound up with the Cocoa frameworks.

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Preface  Table of Contents  Chapter 1. Just Enough C