Sounds like your book predates ARC.
You can develop an application with the same code if you disable ARC in the project settings:
But... ARC has been out for a while, and iOS changes fast. If the book doesn't mention ARC, it's a probably sign that it targets a version of the iOS SDK less than 5.0, which is not necessarily the best way to learn iOS development these days.
You can roughly translate to an ARC environment by just removing [super dealloc], retain, release, and autorelease from the code you see. But it's valuable to understand why those are there in the first place and why they're no longer necessary with ARC.
