Hands-On Objective-C Programming:
Fundamentals for the Mac/iPhone^®/iPad^®

Introduction to the Objective-C Language

Language and tools

• Evolution of Objective-C
• Xcode development environment

Objective-C fundamentals

• Syntax and semantics
• Pointers, structs, functions
• Decisions, loops and logic

Developing Classes in Objective-C

Defining classes

• Declaring the class interface with @interface
• Programming the class using @implementation
• Encapsulating attributes with methods and properties

Creating and using classes

• Importing the interface
• Writing constructors
• Instantiating the classes and invoking methods

Reusing Classes Through Aggregation

Building groups of complex classes

• Defining relationships between classes
• Incorporating the Has-A relationship in class design

Employing Foundation Framework classes

• Simplifying application development with class libraries
• Working with collection classes including NSArray, NSDictionary, NSSet
• Iterating collections with enumerators

Structuring Object-Oriented Class Hierarchies

Exposing interfaces with protocols

• Defining optional and required contracts
• Designing to an interface rather than an implementation to achieve loosely coupled systems
• Working with the id type

Inheritance and polymorphism

• Identifying the Is-A relationship
• Deriving new classes from base classes
• Defining constructors in subclasses
• Leveraging dynamic binding through polymorphism

Categories and extensions

• Creating categories to extend classes without inheritance
• Redeclaring access rights with extensions

Building GUIs

Exploiting the Cocoa framework

• Designing Mac GUIs using Interface Builder
• Communicating between objects with targets and actions
• Implementing the delegate pattern with @selector

Leveraging Cocoa patterns

• Developing an application with MVC
• Synchronizing controls with bindings
• Registering bindings to observe changing data
• Responding to mouse and keyboard events
• Enhancing user interfaces with views and controls

Creating apps with Cocoa Touch

• Designing GUIs for the iPhone and iPad
• Exploring touch events
• Choosing appropriate controls for the limited screen space of mobile devices

Interacting with the Operating System

Comparing alternative memorymanagement techniques

• Manual reference counting(MRC)
• Garbage collection
• Automatic reference counting (ARC)

Accessing the file system

• Storing and retrieving data with NSFileManager
• Obtaining directory and file information
• Creating and deleting files

Enhancing applications with threads

• Creating and managing threads
• Improving responsiveness of the user experience with multi-threading
• Synchronizing threads with mutexes

Packaging Code for Reuse with Libraries and Frameworks

• Comparing dynamic and static libraries
• Wrapping code for public or private reuse
• Developing shared code