David Chisnall - Objective-C Phrasebook

Phrase Book

Second Edition

David Chisnall

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ISBN-13: 978-0-321-81375-6
ISBN-10: 0-321-81375-8

Text printed in the United States on recycled paper at RR Donnelly in Crawfordsville, Indiana.

First printing October 2011

Editor-in-Chief
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David Chisnall is a freelance writer and consultant. While studying for his PhD, he co-founded the toil project, which aims to produce an open-source desktop environment on top of GNUstep, an open-source implementation of the OpenStep and Cocoa APIs. He is an active contributor to GNUstep and is the original author and maintainer of the GNUstep Objective-C 2 runtime library and the associated compiler support in the Clang compiler.

After completing his PhD, David hid in academia for a while, studying the history of programming languages. He finally escaped when he realized that there were places off campus with an equally good view of the sea and without the requirement to complete quite so much paperwork. He occasionally returns to collaborate on projects involving modeling the semantics of dynamic languages.

David has a great deal of familiarity with Objective-C, having worked both on projects using the language and on implementing the language itself. He has also worked on implementing other languages, including dialects of Smalltalk and JavaScript, on top of an Objective-C runtime, allowing mixing code between all of these languages without bridging.

When not writing or programming, David enjoys dancing Argentine Tango and Cuban Salsa, playing badminton and ultimate frisbee, and cooking.

When writing a book about Objective-C, the first person I should thank is Nicolas Roard. I got my first Mac at around the same time I started my PhD and planned to use it to write Java code, not wanting to learn a proprietary language. When I started my PhD, I found myself working with Nicolas, who was an active GNUstep contributor. He convinced me that Objective-C and Cocoa were not just for Macs and that they were both worth learning. He was completely right: Objective-C is a wonderfully elegant language, and the accompanying frameworks make development incredibly easy.

The next person to thank is Fred Kiefer. Fred is the maintainer of the GNUstep implementation of the AppKit framework. He did an incredibly thorough (read: pedantic) technical review of this book, finding several places where things were not explained as well as they could have been. If you enjoy reading this book, then Fred deserves a lot of the credit.

Finally, I need to thank everyone else who was involved in bringing this book from my text editor to your hands, especially Mark Taber who originally proposed the idea to me.

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Blaise Pascal once wrote, I didnt have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead. This phrasebook is the shortest book Ive 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 rle.

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 Developers Handbook, you wont find complete programs as code examples. Instead, youll find very short examples of Objective-C idioms, which hopefully you can employ in a wide range of places.