The Core iOS Developer’s Cookbook, Fifth Edition

Counting Sections and Rows

To create sectioned tables, customize two key data source methods:

numberOfSectionsInTableView:—This method specifies how many sections appear in your table, establishing the number of groups to display. When using a section array, as recommended here, return the number of items in the section array—that is, sectionArray.count. If the number of items is known in advance (26 in this case, even though some sections have no items), you can hard-code that number, but it’s better to code more generally where possible.

tableView:numberOfRowsInSection: ...