UITableView and UITableViewController - iOS Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide - page 289

UITableView's Data Source
The process of providing a UITableView with rows in Cocoa Touch is different from the
typical procedural programming task. In a procedural design, you tell the table view what it
should display. In Cocoa Touch, the table view asks another object - its dataSource -
what it should display. In our case, the ItemsViewController is the data source, so it
needs a way to store item data.
In Chapter 2 , you used an NSMutableArray to store BNRItem instances. You will do
the same thing in this chapter, but with a little twist. The NSMutableArray that holds
the BNRItem instances will be abstracted into another object - a BNRItemStore ( Fig-
ure 9.6 ).
Figure 9.6 Homepwner object diagram