This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
4.9 Summary
In this chapter, we've gone through the most important aspects of the Foundation framework. This framework covers the core functionality of the Cocoa development environment and even provides a number of features that would typically be thought of as part of the language, such as reference counting and message forwarding.
We spent some time examining the core concepts of the Foundation library. In subsequent chapters, you will see examples of all of the things we've discussed here.
We looked at the collection classes provided by Foundation—sets, arrays, and dictionaries—and how enumeration of these types works. We saw the basic value types used to store non-object values in collections.
The most important aspects of the Foundation framework were covered in this chapter. This should not be taken as an exhaustive reference. The framework contains a large number of classes and functions. If you printed out just the class references from the Foundation framework, you would end up with something longer than this entire book, and many of the method descriptions would still be single-line comments.
In-depth understanding of all of the details of the Foundation library is almost impossible. The purpose of this chapter was to highlight the most important parts to look at. Familiarity with the classes discussed in this chapter goes a long way toward making a good Cocoa programmer.