Core Data, 2nd Edition
- Length: 256 pages
- Edition: 2
- Language: English
- Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf
- Publication Date: 2013-02-12
- ISBN-10: 1937785084
- ISBN-13: 9781937785086
- Sales Rank: #589088 (See Top 100 Books)
Core Data is intricate, powerful, necessary – and this book is your guide to harnessing its power. Core Data is Apple’s recommended way to persist data: it’s easy to use, built-in, and integrated with iCloud. You’ll learn fundamental Core Data principles such as thread and memory management, and you’ll discover how to use Core Data in your iPhone, iPad, and OS X projects by using NSPredicate to filter data and adding iCloud to your applications.
What You Need:
Mac OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6
Cocoa expert Marcus Zarra walks you through developing a full-featured application based around the Core Data APIs. You’ll build up a single application throughout the book, learning key Core Data principles such as NSPredicate, thread management, and memory management.
You’ll start with the basics of Core Data and learn how to use it to develop your application. Then you’ll delve deep into the details of the API. You’ll explore not only how to get Core Data integrated into your application properly, but even better, how to work with the API’s flexibility to create convenience methods to improve your application’s maintainability. You’ll learn how to reduce your number of mapping models, integrate your Core Data app with Spotlight and Quick Look, connect your application with sync services, and find out how to use Core Data in a multithreaded environment. By the end of the book, you’ll have built a full-featured application, gained a complete understanding of Core Data, and learned how to integrate your application into the iPhone/iPad platform.
This second edition updates all examples for OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6, gets you up to speed on changes in multithreading, and provides new chapters covering iCloud and NSFetchedResultsController.
Q&A with “Core Data, 2nd edition” author Marcus Zarra
Q. Why is Core Data important? Why do developers need to know it?
A. Core Data is Apple’s recommended model management and persistence framework. By learning and using Core Data, you can save yourself a significant amount of development time on every application you build. In some cases, you can save as much as 30 percent of the application development time by using Core Data.
Q. How has Core Data changed since the first edition of this book?
A. Starting with iOS 5.0 and Mac OS X 10.7, the majority of Core Data has remained remarkably consistent since the first release of this book. It has become even more friendly with threading. In addition, the framework has solved a few difficult issues that existed since its inception. However, our understanding of Core Data on iOS has grown significantly since its initial release. That increased understanding is included in this book.
Q. What’s new in this edition?
A. Significant portions of the book have been rewritten with a new focus primarily on iOS, and secondarily on OS X. Since iOS has all of the features that are available on OS X, you can learn the entirety of Core Data through iOS. The portions of the book that focus solely on iOS are clearly marked.
Q. What kind of background do readers need to get the most out of this book?
A. A reader interested in this book should be familiar with Objective-C and Cocoa. The book assumes you have a basic working knowledge of Objective-C and have developed one or more iOS/Mac OS X applications. It cannot be stressed enough that this book is written for developers at an intermediate level and could be quite difficult for a beginner to consume.
Q. What kind of application do you build in this book, and what does Core Data add to it?
A. From the beginning of the book, we will develop a recipe iOS application and then refine it as our knowledge and understanding grows. Core Data is an integral part of the application that we develop and handles the management of the data structures as well as the persistence of the data. Without Core Data, we would need to write a significant amount of code to replace it.
Q. What should readers expect to take away from the book?
A. A solid understanding of Core Data and how to use it in both future and existing applications. Once you become comfortable with Core Data, you won’t want to use any other persistence framework.
