Chapter 1

Hello

Welcome to Learn Objective-C on the Mac! This book is designed to teach you the basics of the Objective-C language. Objective-C is a superset of C and is the language used by many (if not most) applications that have a true Mac OS X look and feel.

This book teaches you the Objective-C language and introduces you to its companion, Apple's Cocoa toolkit. Cocoa is written in Objective-C and contains all the elements of the Mac OS X user interface, plus a whole lot more. Once you learn Objective-C in this book, you'll be ready to dive into Cocoa with a full-blown project or another book such as Learn Cocoa on the Mac or Beginning iPhone Development, both by Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche (Apress 2009).

In this chapter, we'll let you know the basic information you need before you get started with this book. We'll also serve up a bit of history about Objective-C and give you a thumbnail sketch of what's to come in future chapters.