Blaise Pascal once wrote, “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” This phrasebook is the shortest book I’ve written, and trying to fit everything that I wanted to say into a volume this short was a challenge.
When Mark Taber originally suggested that I write an Objective-C Phrasebook, I was not sure what it would look like. A phrasebook for a natural language is a list of short idioms that can be used by people who find themselves in need of a quick sentence or two. A phrasebook for a programming language should fulfil a similar rôle.
This book is not a language reference. Apple provides a competent reference for the Objective- C language on the http://developer.apple. com site. This is not a detailed tutorial; unlike my other Objective-C book, Cocoa Programming Developer’s Handbook, you won’t find complete programs as code examples. Instead, you’ll find very short examples of Objective-C idioms, which hopefully you can employ in a wide range of places.
