You can ask yourself the question, "Why would I read the book about this library?" Of course, you can read the RestKit documentation. It's a perfect example of how to write down a good API reference for a framework. On the other hand, you can dive into researching the RestKit test cases, which is also nice and interesting, as the unit tests are covering almost all the functionalities of a framework. However, it won't make you happy.
While reading the API documentation is nice and it is full of simple examples for every class, it won't help you understand how to easily apply the framework in your daily jobs. Therefore, the key goal of this book is to provide guidance and real-life usage examples. We will start from a basic example of how to load a simple list of objects to creating a full-featured app, with advanced mapping techniques, Core Data integration, and so on.
Chapter 1, Getting Started, starts with the key concepts of RestKit, describes how to install it, and shows a short example of basic data loading.
Chapter 2, Modeling and Loading Remote Objects, describes how to configure RestKit and data mapping, how to use one-line methods to load objects and push them back to the server, and how to integrate the code with nice UI.
Chapter 3, Persistence with Core Data, describes how to make RestKit persist and synchronize data with Core Data databases.
Chapter 4, Advanced Stuff, covers some more advanced features of RestKit and AFNetworking libraries that developers might use in everyday app development and will help overcome potential bottlenecks.
Appendix A, Helpful Resources, lists links to nice guides that might be useful to a developer.
Appendix B, Helpful Libraries, lists links and describes some popular libraries that might be useful for developing iOS apps.
A free Apple iOS Developer account with Xcode 4.5 running in OS X, and an Internet connection for downloading the RestKit and related libraries.
iOS developers of all levels who are interested in boosting their productivity by using third-party libraries with a willingness to learn how to build RESTful apps using the RestKit framework. Basic knowledge of Objective-C is required and a simple understanding of how Core Data works.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "It heavily uses tables (such as UITableViewController) to present the loaded data (list of objects) to the user."
A block of code is set as follows:
// in MDatabase @implementation
- (NSString *)titleText
{
return self.name;
}
- (NSString *)subtitleText
{
return self.plan;
}When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:
[self setupObjectManager];
// Setup CoreData stack after Object Manager
[self setupCoreData];
[self setupMappings];
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "A Save button is added to the navigation controller, it triggers the saveAction method with the following code."
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