There’s an interesting challenge when you’re writing a book for what is effectively a subsystem. How does one describe the subsystem without being distracted by the overall system that it intended to interact with? This is the problem that we’re solving in this first chapter of the book. In this chapter we aren’t going to talk about Core Data; instead, we’re going to, very quickly, build up an app for our Core Data work to interact with. We can then use this application throughout most of the rest of the book to run and play with while learning about Core Data.
On our journey to learn about Core Data, we’re going to use an original iPhone recipe application. While the application itself is fairly complex and contains a large number of views, the concepts behind these views are standard and will be familiar to anyone who has done work in Objective-C. If you haven’t yet mastered Objective-C and Cocoa, I highly suggest you review Chris Adamson and Janie Clayton’s iOS 9 SDK Development [Cla16], published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf.
Our goal in this chapter is to establish a baseline application from which to work. Core Data is a supporting framework, and we need something for it to support in order to explore and demonstrate its features and characteristics. This recipe application is the foundation used in the book. You can use this chapter as a reference of the overall picture of the application as we’re exploring the inner workings of Core Data in the rest of the chapters.
If you’re already comfortable with storyboards and the creation of iOS applications, feel free to skim the provided code sample and jump to Chapter 2, Under the Hood of Core Data, in which we’ll begin to dive into the substance of Core Data.