Introduction

Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This phrasebook, at under 350 (small) pages, is the shortest book I’ve written, and trying to fit everything that I wanted to say into a volume this short was a challenge.

When Mark Taber originally suggested that I write an Objective-C Phrasebook, I was not sure what it would look like. A phrasebook for a natural language is a list of short idioms that can be used by people who find themselves in need of a quick sentence or two. A phrasebook for a programming language should fulfil a similar rôle.

This book is not a language reference. Apple provides a competent reference for the Objective-C language on the http://developer.apple.com site. This is not a detailed tutorial; unlike my other Objective-C book, Cocoa Programming Developer’s Handbook, you won’t find complete programs as code examples. Instead, you’ll find very short examples of Objective-C idioms, which hopefully you can employ in a wide range of places.

One of the most frustrating things in life is finding that code examples in a book don’t actually work. There are two sorts of code listings in this book. Code on a white background is intended to illustrate a simple point. This code may depend on some implied context and should not be taken as working, usable examples. The majority of the code you will find in this book is on a gray background. At the bottom of each of these examples, you will find the name of the file that the listing was taken from. You can download these from the book’s page on InformIT’s website: http://www.informit.com/title/0321743628

A Note About Typesetting

This book was written in Vim, using semantic markup. From here, three different versions are generated. Two are created using pdflatex. If you are reading either the printed or PDF version, then you can see one of these. The only difference between the two is that the print version contains crop marks to allow the printer to trim the pages.

The third version is XHTML, intended for the ePub edition. This is created using the EtoileText framework, which first parses the LaTeX-style markup to a tree structure, then performs some transformations for handling cross-references and indexing, and finally generates XHTML. The code for doing this is all written in Objective-C.

If you have access to both, you may notice that the code listings look slightly nicer in the ePub edition. This is because EtoileText uses SourceCodeKit, another Étoilé framework, for syntax highlighting. This uses part of Clang, a modern Objective-C compiler, to mark up the code listings. This means that ranges of the code are annotated with exactly the same semantic types that the compiler sees. For example, it can distinguish between a function call and a macro instantiation.

You can find all of the code for doing this in the Étoilé subversion repository: http://svn.gna.org/viewcvs/etoile/trunk/Etoile/