Objective-C Succinctly, Syncfusion

Objective-C is the programming language behind native Apple applications. The language was originally designed in the 1980s as a way to add object-oriented capabilities to the ANSI C programming language, and it has since been used to create everything from command-line tools to Mac programs to mobile apps. You can think of Objective-C as Apple’s version of the C# programming language.

However, learning Objective-C is only one aspect of iPhone, iPad, and Mac app development. On top of the language lie a handful of frameworks that provide the tools necessary to build apps for any of these platforms. For example, the UIKit framework defines the basic UI components you see on your iPhone (buttons, lists, images, etc.), while the Core Data framework provides an API for saving and retrieving data from a device. Objective-C is the glue that lets you pull together these tools and assemble them into a useful program.

Objective-C Succinctly is the first installment in a two-part series on Apple app development. In this book, we’ll explore the entire Objective-C language using hands-on examples. We’ll focus on learning core language concepts by building command-line tools, which means we won’t be building graphical applications in this book. This lays the foundation for iOS Succinctly, which explores the iOS framework underlying iPhone and iPad apps. Both books utilize Xcode, Apple’s official integrated development environment.