Comprehensive Introduction to Objective C Programming

The course is for those who have relatively little programming experience. Unlike many Objective C programming courses, this course covers the underlying C on which Objective C is based in considerable detail. It also provides a sound introduction to Object Oriented Programming concepts and practice and introduces and makes extensive use of UML diagrams to explain and communicate these concepts and practices.

The course will be useful to a wide range of interests related to

• iPhone applications development
• MAC OSX applications development
• iPad and iPod application development

The course assumes a basic knowledge of programming.

The purpose of this course is to

• provide a sound foundation in Objective C programming
• provide a good understanding of object oriented concepts and object oriented programming
• introduce UML and UML based analysis and design
• lay the foundations for project development, testing and debugging using the XCode Integrated Development Environment (IDE)

• Introduction
• Overview of C and Objective C
• Survey of the XCode IDE
• Creating and Building Projects
• Compiling and running Hello.c - compiling in xcode and terminal Commandline vs. Cocoa (touch)

• basic data types
• literals, variables, operators and expressions
• functions
• flow control
  • if - else and switch statements
  • the conditional operator
  • for, while, and do-while statements
  • break, continue and goto
• arrays and pointers
• enum, typedef, union
• type conversion - implicit vs. explicit

• Objects, methods, interfaces, message passing metaphor
• classes and instances
• UML class diagrams and object diagrams
• inheritance
• polymorphism
• inverting a matrix via row operations

• Creation, management and destruction of objects
• Synthesize property, static, abstract, self and super
• Visibility modifiers
• Class implementation
• Creating instances of classes
• Invoking methods on instances

• Dynamic typing and binding
  • The id type
  • How dynamic binding works
  • Using isKindOf to determine the type of an instance
  • Case study: linked lists containing a variety of node types
• Protocols
  • The basic concept
  • Inheritance of protocols
  • conformsTo
• Categories
  • Categories as an alternative to subclassing