Product Details
Core Data: Apple's API for Persisting Data on Mac OS X

Core Data: Apple's API for Persisting Data on Mac OS X
By Marcus Zarra, Zarra Marcus

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Product Description

Whether you are targeting Mac OS X or the iPhone, at some point your Cocoa application is probably going to need to persist data. You could struggle with SQLite, generate XML, or create your own binary format. Or, you can save time and energy by taking advantage of Apple's Core Data API instead.

Core Data makes it easy for you to work with object graphs and to persist data-but there are plenty of pitfalls and issues to watch out for. This book shows you everything from versioning to integrating with Quick Look, Sync Services, and Spotlight. You'll see how to boost performance and work in multithreaded applications. You'll work with Core Data on both the desktop and the iPhone.

By the end of Core Data, you'll have built a full-featured application, gained a complete understanding of Core Data, and learned how to integrate your application into OS X.

As an extra bonus, you'll see numerous recipes that are useful in unusual situations, or even in places where you wouldn't have thought to use the Core Data API before. It will become another indispensable tool in your kit.

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #126002 in Books
  • Published on: 2009-10-28
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 256 pages

Features

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Marcus S. Zarra is the owner of Zarra Studios LLC and the creator of seSales and iWeb Buddy. In addition, he is a co-author of "Cocoa Is My Girlfriend," a wildly popular blog covering all aspects of Cocoa development. Marcus S. Zarra has been developing software since the mid-1980s and has written software in all of the major technological fields.

Customer Reviews

Great introduction to Core Data5
Core Data is one of the denser, more complex APIs in the Cocoa framework and Marcus' book does a great job of introducing you to the concepts and terminology. The sample application that is built throughout the book is a sensible choice and easy to understand. Some sections such as the import/export example I found incredibly useful after struggling on my own through the same issues before I bought the book.

The only thing I found missing was much discussion of NSPersistentDocument and document-based apps, there is only an in-passing reference to this type of application but since Apple already has a great tutorial on this in their documentation it's not a major issue.

If you want to get up to speed quickly with Core Data I'd highly recommend this book. It is a much easier read than the official Apple documentation and covers all the bases. If nothing else, the Apple docs will be much easier to wrap your head around once you've worked through this book first.

Nice walkthrough, Smelly book5
So far I've read thru chapters 1-2 and followed the tutorial on creating a functional recipe database app using core data. Chapter 2 is a quick walk-through on the tutorial. It's intentionally brief. The rest of the book is meant to elaborate and expand on the ideas used. It does assume some general Cocoa / X-Code knowledge, which is one reason why it's brief. I'm new to Cocoa and X-Code, but I was easily able to follow the tutorial and come out with a neat functional app despite the lack of hand-holding.

I haven't read chapter 3 yet, as I just got this book. But so far it's well written and I had a lot of fun making the app.

P.S. This book stinks, literally. It smells bad! I wonder what kinda ink / paper combo was used to achieve this.

Good on theory, not all that helpful for iPhone developers4
There are some very good explanations in this book and, for desktop OS X use, I think it's probably a very useful book (4-5 stars). Unfortunately the chapter on core data and iPhone is quite messy. The chapter mixes upgrading an existing iPhone app to use core data and starting from scratch with the nav template available from SDK 3.0. It doesn't clearly explain what needs to be copied over (model, sqlite db etc), though you can deduce this. The existing template code isn't separated from the code the author has added, and some of the author's code appears to replace the template code.

Given that many people will be coming to core data on iPhone with new projects it would have been helpful to see three, clearly distinct, sub-sections:

1) starting a core data project from scratch on iPhone (post-SDK 3)
2) importing a core data model and persistent store from the desktop to use in an iPhone app (post-SDK 3)
3) upgrading an existing app (pre-SDK 3) to use core data

For iPhone developers new to core data I'd recommend building an app from scratch using the Apress, or PragProg, or Sams intro books and then reading this book to understand what core data is all about in the larger world view. No book that I'm aware really covers core data on iPhone very well.