In Detail

Darwin, which forms the core set of components for OS X and iOS, is compatible with the Single UNIX Specification Version 3 and POSIX UNIX. Therefore OS X and iOS are UNIX operating systems. While there are numerous books and articles written to teach network development in a UNIX environment there is surprisingly little dedicated to teaching network development specifically in an Apple environment. In this book we will be covering the standard UNIX networking stack with BSD Sockets as well as Apple’s frameworks like CFNetworking and Bonjour.

“iOS and OS X Network Programming Cookbook” is an enthralling code-focused book on developing client and server applications for the iOS and OS X environments. You will learn how to integrate a number of Unix (BSD Sockets), Apple specific (CFNetworking, NSMutableURLRequest, Bonjour) and third party APIs (AFNetworking, MKNetworking) with your own apps.

“iOS and OS X Network Programming Cookbook” begins by showing you how to build both client and server applications using the BSD Socket Library as well as Apple’s CFNetworking library. The sample code includes samples for both iOS and OS X.

It then covers how to add Bonjour to publish, find, and connect to services. This can be used to create peer-to-peer applications over local networks. Finally it shows how to integrate third-party libraries like Libnet, LibPCAP, AFNetworking, and MKNetworking with the reader’s apps.

A lot of developers do not realize that iOS is a full UNIX-based operating system that contains a full set of networking APIs. These APIs can be used to create both client- and server-based applications in the iOS environment as well as OS X. Using the Apple’s Bonjour library you will learn how to publish, find, and connect the services together without hardcoding the connection information. There are also a number of third-party APIs that can be used to easily connect iOS and OS X applications to web-based services. Finally this book will cover several low level libraries like LibNET and LibPCAP on the OS X environment.

“iOS and OS X Network Programming Cookbook” will cover several UNIX, Apple, and third-party libraries and APIs. The book will show the user how to integrate all of these libraries and APIs with their applications.

Approach

This book follows a recipe-based approach that will heavily focus on the code and how to integrate the samples with the reader’s projects.Each recipe consists of one or more methods that you can put directly into your app and use.

Who this book is for

This book is ideal for developers that want to create network applications for the Apple OS X or iOS platforms. All examples are written in Objective-C using XCode as the IDE. Knowledge of Objective-C and X-Code is essential.

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