9. Memory management

This chapter covers Object lifetime management Manual memory management via retain and release messages Autorelease pools and the autorelease message Object ownership rules Memory management rules for custom classes

Many developers new to Objective-C find memory management one of the most difficult concepts to wrap their heads around. This is especially true for those coming from an environment such as Java, .NET, ActiveScript, or Ruby, where memory management is a much more automated, behind-the-scenes process.