Core Data: Data Storage and Management for iOS, OS X, and iCloud

by Marcus S. Zarra

Core Data is Apple's recommended way to persist it's easy to use, built-in, and integrated with iCloud. It's intricate, powerful, and necessary--and this book is your guide to harnessing its power.

Learn fundamental Core Data principles such as thread and memory management, discover how to use Core Data in your iPhone, iPad, and OS X projects by using NSPredicate to filter data, and see how to add iCloud to your applications.

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.

Geared toward intermediate to advanced developers, this book gets you comfortable with the basics of Core Data. 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. 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.

What You Need Mac OS X Mountain Lion and iOS 6. This book is for intermediate-level iOS developers.

Genres: Programming, Computers, Computer Science

256 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 5, 2013

Reviews

[Jessica Lam · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was highly recommended by a couple people I know and it did not disappoint. It was to the point and extremely helpful in taking me from never having worked with CoreData to a working knowledge of the technology for implementation as well as making sound engineering decisions. The author has a well known blog with nuggets of great info as well. Awesome author, great book!

[Geoff Pado · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you are doing anything with Core Data, you owe it to yourself to read this book. Even if you think you know what you're doing. Marcus covers all the little things that will come and bite you eventually. I wish I'd read this book 6 months ago.

[Jose Lobato · Rating 3 out of 5]

Basic

[Alexandru Solomon · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good! covers most of the use cases including local -> remote syncing

[Linda · Rating 2 out of 5]

I wanted to like this more than it turned out I did.

While the book is written well and fairly easy to follow (for those that have at least some background in Mac or iOS programming), it is a bit out of date now. And, the biggest reason I was disappointed was that it fails to adequately mixing Core Data with documented-based applications. On iOS there is UIManagedDocument but NSPersistentDocument on the Mac is not nearly as capable and really needs a replacement class. In my opinion the book really needs to spend some time on this (and be brought up to date for current versions of the operating systems).

[Doug]

This book is splendid, but you will need PLENTY of experience with setting up apps with persistence.

[Dmitry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good overview of core data + best practices. Worth reading.