Introduction

Welcome to Objective-C. This book is your guided tour of this exciting language, and it gives you what you need to start working with Objective-C at once.

Using Objective-C, you can write professional programs that make use of many object-oriented features—from the basics up to advanced class inheritance and exception (run-time error) handling.

Objective-C runs on many different platforms. For the most part, your code should work unchanged on all platforms that Objective-C supports, but where differences in support exist, this book points them out to you.

This book starts with the basics and continues on through advanced topics. You’ll begin by looking at how to get Objective-C started and how to run basic programs. From there, you’ll explore data handling, again starting with the basics and moving on through advanced topics.

After looking at how to write your own functions, you’ll wrap functions and data together into objects—the core of Objective-C programming. And when you start working with object-oriented programming, the lid is off—and we’ll push the envelope as far as it can go.

That’s the plan, then: to present a guided tour of Objective-C, taking you from the beginning to the most advanced topics. Let’s get started with Chapter 1 now.