Introduction

An object-oriented approach to application development makes programs more intuitive to design, faster to develop, more amenable to modification, and easier to understand. Most object-oriented development environments consist of at least three parts:

The Objective-C language is a programming language designed to enable sophisticated object-oriented programming. Objective-C is defined as a small but powerful set of extensions to the standard ANSI C language. Its additions to C are mostly based on Smalltalk, one of the first object-oriented programming languages. Objective-C is designed to give C full object-oriented programming capabilities and to do so in a simple and straightforward way.

Every object-oriented programming language and environment has a different perspective on what object-oriented means, how objects behave, and how programs might be structured. This document offers the Objective-C perspective.

Who Should Read This Document

For those who have never used object-oriented programming to create applications, this document is designed to help you become familiar with object-oriented development. It spells out some of the implications of object-oriented design and gives you a flavor of what writing an object-oriented program is really like.

If you have developed applications using an object-oriented environment, this document will help you understand the fundamental concepts that are essential to understanding how to use Objective-C effectively and how to structure a program that uses Objective-C.

Because this isn’t a document about C, it assumes some prior acquaintance with that language. However, it doesn’t have to be an extensive acquaintance. Object-oriented programming in Objective-C is sufficiently different from procedural programming in ANSI C that you won’t be hampered if you’re not an experienced C programmer.

Organization of This Document

This document is divided into several chapters:

See Also

Programming with Objective-C describes the Objective-C programming language.

Objective-C Runtime Programming Guide describes how you can interact with the Objective-C runtime.

Objective-C Runtime Reference describes the data structures and functions of the Objective-C runtime support library. Your programs can use these interfaces to interact with the Objective-C runtime system. For example, you can add classes or methods, or obtain a list of all class definitions for loaded classes.