Mac Programming for Absolute Beginners

Chapter 5. Learning Objective-C

In the old days of programming, you had to write code to create your user interface and then create your actual program. With Xcode, you can create your user interface without writing any code at all. However, to make your program do something, you'll still need to write code. Although you can theoretically use any programming language to create a Mac program, the language used most often (even by Apple's programmers themselves) for this task is Objective-C.

When learning any programming language, you must first learn the syntax, which defines how to write commands in a particular programming language. Then you need to learn how to do common tasks used to create a typical program.

If you're already familiar with another ...