Preface

Managing memory is one of the toughest problems we deal with in Objective-C. This book will provide you with the most important information about effective memory management in your applications.

The practical element will also ensure that the programmers can actively learn key methods and concepts of memory management in a more engaging way rather than just simply read the book. Throughout this book, I will be giving examples of code.

These example code will demonstrate the fundamentals of programming and memory management as well as cover some aspects of iOS development such as Core Data. All these Xcode projects are ready to run out of the box and you do not need any additional setup to run the code. Just make sure that you have the the latest version of Xcode, which is version 6 at this point in time.

So, this book will help you become aware of memory management and how to implement this correctly and effectively while being aware of the benefits at the same time. This tutorial-based book will actively demonstrate techniques for the implementation of memory management, showing the resultant effects on performance and effective implementation.

I have to mention that in this book, I will speak about the most recent standard of Objective-C and Objective-C 2.0. Apple suggests Objective-C as a main tool of development for their platform and strives to improve the product continuously.

I must say that not all of Apple's attempts to improve Objective-C have been entirely successful. Garbage collection is an example of ineffective memory management. It is deprecated since OS X Version 10.8 in favor of Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) and is scheduled to be removed in a future version of OS X.

I have been working with Objective-C for years and C++ for even longer. Hence, memory management is not an alien concept to me as I have been debugging and tracing memory leaks for years in the course of my work at Azukisoft Pte Ltd.

At my job at Azukisoft Pte Ltd, I work mostly with Objective-C but with the occasional C++ thrown into the mix. And this is a very interesting combination, which will be highlighted in this book too.