The Core iOS Developer’s Cookbook, Fifth Edition

Introducing Core Data

Core Data simplifies the way your applications create and use persisted objects, known as managed objects. Until the 3.x SDK, all data management and SQL access were left to a fairly low-level library. It wasn’t pretty, and it wasn’t easy to use. Since then, Core Data has joined the Cocoa Touch framework family, bringing powerful data management solutions to iOS. Core Data provides a flexible infrastructure, offering tools for working with persistent data stores and generating solutions for the complete object life cycle.

Core Data lives in the model portion of the Model–View–Controller (MVC) paradigm. It understands that application-specific data must be defined and controlled outside the application’s GUI, even as it ...