Objective-C 2.0: Anwendungen entwickeln für Mac und iPhone - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 382733053X ISBN 13: 9783827330536

Synopsis

With this book, you will learn to program in Objective-C 2.0 - the default language for developing native applications for the Mac OS X and iPhone platform. Even if you don't have any programming experience yet, the author takes you in three steps from language basics to using the Foundation framework to developing an iPhone application. From the beginning, they work object-oriented and always based on concrete examples.

(from the introductory first chapter)

The construction of this book

This book is divided into three parts. Part I, "The Language Objective-C", teaches the basics of language. In Part II, "The Foundation Framework," you'll learn how to leverage the rich collection of predefined classes that make up the titular framework. Part III, "Cocoa and the iPhone SDK", gives an overview of the application kit framework in Cocoa and introduces you to the development of a simple iPhone application using the UIKit framework, creating and debugging the code in Xcode and Interface Builder.

A framework is a set of classes and routines that have been logically grouped to make writing programs easier. One of the biggest advantages of programming in Objective-C is the availability of rich frameworks.

Chapter 2, "Programming in Objective-C," introduces you to how to write a first program in Objective-C.

Since this is not a book on Cocoa programming, graphical user interfaces (GUI) are not explained in detail and also mentioned only in margins in Part III. So a different approach was needed for the inputs and outputs of a program. Most sample programs in this book take input from the keyboard and evoke output in a window: a terminal window when you run gcc on the command line, or a console window if you use Xcode.

Chapter 3, "Classes, Objects, and Methods," discusses the basics of object-oriented programming. Some terminology is also introduced in this chapter, but in doing so I limit myself to the minimum. I also introduced the mechanism for defining classes and the measures for sending messages to instances and objects. Lecturers and experienced Objective-C programmers will notice that I use static typing for declaring objects. I believe this is the best way for learners to take their first steps as the compiler catches more errors. The programs become self-explanatory and new programmers are encouraged to explicitly declare the data types when they are known. Therefore, the data type id and what it is able to accomplish is not described until Chapter 9, "Polymorphism, Dynamic Typing and Dynamic Binding".

Chapter 4, "Data Types and Expressions," describes the basic data types in Objective-C and explains how to use them in your programs.

Chapter 5, "Program Loops", introduces the three loop instructions you can use in your programs: for, while, and do.

Making decisions is a fundamental skill of any programming language. Chapter 6, "Making Decisions," discusses in detail the if and switch statements provided by Objective-C.

In Chapter 7, "More on Classes," we delve deeper into the topic of working with classes and objects. Details of methods, multiple arguments for methods, and local variables are discussed here.

Chapter 8, "Inheritance," introduces the key principle of inheritance. This feature makes it easier to develop programs by allowing you to always use what is available to you from a higher level. Inheritance and subclass formation make it easy to modify and expand existing class definitions.

Topic of Chapter 9 are three fundamental features of Objective-C language, namely polymorphism, dynamic typing, and dynamic binding.

In chapters 10 through 13, the discussion of the language Objective-C is concluded. Topics here are the initialization of objects, protocols, categories, the preprocessor, and some of the underlying features of C such as functions, arrays, structures, and pointers. When developing object-oriented applications, these underlying features are usually unnecessary (and should be avoided) at the beginning. I recommend that you only skim Chapter 13, "Underlying Elements of Language C" at the first reading of this book and not look at it more closely until it is necessary to learn about a particular language element.

Part II begins with Chapter 14, "Introduction to the Foundation Framework". Here you will get a brief introduction to the framework and learn how to access its documentation.

Chapters 15 through 19 deal with important elements of the Foundation framework such as numbers and string objects, collections, file system access, memory management, and copying and archiving objects.

Once you've worked through Part II, you are able to already write quite challenging programs in Objective-C that utilize the Foundation framework.

Part III begins with Chapter 20, "Introduction to Cocoa". Get an overview of the Framework Application Kit, which includes the classes for developing demanding graphical applications for Mac.

Chapter 21, "Writing iPhone Applications", introduces the iPhone SDK and framework UIKit. Here you write step by step a simple application for the iPhone (or iPod Touch) and a calculator program where you can perform simple arithmetic calculations with fractions on the iPhone.

Since the language use of object-oriented programming contains a lot of special terminology, you will get some definitions of common terms in Appendix A, "Glossary," for example.

Appendix B, "Overview of Objective-C 2.0", gives an overview of the language and serves as a reference book.

In Appendix C, "Source Code for the Address Book Program," you will find the source code for the two classes developed and used extensively in Part II of this book. The classes define address books and business cards. The methods included in it allow you to perform simple operations, such as adding and removing business cards from an address book, looking up an entry, listing the contents of an address book, etc.

After learning how to write programs in Objective-C, many paths are open to you. You may want to learn more about the underlying C language, write Cocoa programs running on Mac OS X, or develop more sophisticated iPhone applications. In any case, Appendix D, "Sources", gives you important finger point.

Edition details

• Language: German
• ISBN 10: 382733053X
• ISBN 13: 9783827330536
• Binding: Hardcover