This book is for anyone who wants to get the most out of Xcode. It's for anyone creating multiple projects, large projects, projects that produce multiple products, and projects that need to be built for different deployment targets. It's for anyone working on an open source project, setting up source control, sharing development assets between projects, or collaborating with other developers.

This book is for anyone who wants to write source code efficiently, navigate between files, quickly rename variables, or refactor a class. This book covers the length and breadth of the Xcode editors, their navigation, syntax coloring, and code completion. It describes the many search and replace functions, class browsing, class modeling, and class refactoring.

This book is for anyone who's ever tried to find something in the documentation. It explains the documentation help viewer, research assistant, and quick help. It explains how to search the documentation by topic, symbol name, and how to filter the results by programming language. It shows you shortcuts for jumping from your source code right to the definition or documentation of any function, class, or symbol.

This book is for anyone who needs to debug, analyze, and polish a Mac OS X or iPhone application. It explains how to use the debugger, create and set complex conditional breakpoints, create custom data interpreters, debug on a second computer remotely, and debug full-screen applications. It shows you how to look for inefficient code, track down memory leaks, catch application crashes, and debug an application that's already running.

Finally, this book is for anyone who wants to automate their workflow. This book explains how to add custom script phases to targets, custom code templates in the editor, write breakpoint actions that run during debugging, attach action scripts to their project, and share those solutions with other developers.

This book covers the Xcode Integrated Development Environment (IDE) application. The Xcode Development Tools is the suite of resources that includes the Xcode application. Xcode (the application) is your cockpit, your command center, which drives the whole of the rest of your development system. While there are many interesting things you can do with the development tools, this book concentrates on Xcode (the application) and an Xcode-centric workflow. It shows you how to use your compilers, debuggers, linkers, data models, source control, documentation, and automation tools — all without ever stepping outside the Xcode application.

This book covers other important developer tools, particularly those that you'll use in conjunction with Xcode. The most significant are Interface Builder, Instruments, and Shark. All of these tools work hand-in-glove with Xcode, and you'll learn how to seamlessly transition between them.

This book also serves as a guide to additional research. No single book could possibly cover every aspect of Mac OS X and iPhone OS development. Apple produces a vast amount of high-quality documentation. This book often sketches the outline of a common solution, and then points you to the documentation or resource where you can explore the topic more completely.

Professional Xcode 3 is broadly organized in the order you typically develop a project. Of course development is never a linear process, but the chapters mimic the general steps you take when producing software:

Each chapter includes a brief introduction to the topic, followed by successively more detailed explanations of the technology. If you want to learn everything about, say, targets you can read Chapter 16 from start to finish. But if you only need to answer the question "should I create a target or a new project," that answer is in the first couple of sections. If you don't need to create a new target, you can move on. Come back later when you need to create a target, or customize an existing one.

I've tried to organize the book topically so that it can serve as a resource for future research. When you first create a data model in Core Data, you probably aren't worrying about developing a migration map to the next version of your data model. But when you do create that second version, I trust that you'll know where to open the book and find the answer. (Hint, it's in the Data Modeling chapter.)

This book was written for Xcode 3.2. To use Xcode 3.2, you will need the following:

Even though Xcode 3.2 will only run on an Intel-based Macintosh running 10.6, Xcode can produce applications compatible with PowerPC-based systems, Mac operating systems as old as Mac OS X 10.4, and any version of the iPhone OS.

To help you get the most from the text and keep track of what's happening, we've used a number of conventions throughout the book.

As for styles in the text:

We use a monofont type with no highlighting for most code examples.

As you work through the examples in this book, you may choose either to type in all the code manually or to use the source code files that accompany the book. All of the source code used in this book is available for download at http://www.wrox.com. Once at the site, simply locate the book's title (either by using the Search box or by using one of the title lists) and click the Download Code link on the book's detail page to obtain all the source code for the book.

Once you download the code, just decompress it with your favorite compression tool. Alternately, you can go to the main Wrox code download page at http://www.wrox.com/dynamic/books/download.aspx to see the code available for this book and all other Wrox books.

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If you don't spot "your" error on the Book Errata page, go to www.wrox.com/contact/techsupport.shtml and complete the form there to send us the error you have found. We'll check the information and, if appropriate, post a message to the book's errata page and fix the problem in subsequent editions of the book.

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