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今天开始新的一章，讲objective-c的类的扩展，通过继承现有类来扩展类的功能。先看下overview的介绍。

Customizing Existing Classes

Objects should have clearly-defined tasks, such as modeling specific information, displaying visual content or controlling the flow of information. As you’ve already seen, a class interface defines the ways in which others are expected to interact with an object to help it accomplish those tasks.

Sometimes, you may find that you wish to extend an existing class by adding behavior that is useful only in certain situations. As an example, you might find that your application often needs to display a string of characters in a visual interface. Rather than creating some string-drawing object to use every time you need to display a string, it would make more sense if it was possible to give the NSString class itself the ability to draw its own characters on screen.

In situations like this, it doesn’t always make sense to add the utility behavior to the original, primary class interface. Drawing abilities are unlikely to be needed the majority of times any string object is used in an application, for example, and in the case of NSString, you can’t modify the original interface or implementation because it’s a framework class.

Furthermore, it might not make sense to subclass the existing class, because you may want your drawing behavior available not only to the original NSString class but also any subclasses of that class, like NSMutableString. And, although NSString is available on both OS X and iOS, the drawing code would need to be different for each platform, so you’d need to use a different subclass on each platform.

Instead, Objective-C allows you to add your own methods to existing classes through categories and class extensions.