Understanding class objects?

[html_dns]

I've been self teaching myself Objective-C for the past week, having trouble understanding this concept. An extract from the book I'm reading says

To get a class object from a class name, you write the following,
[Square class]; // where Square is the class name.

From reading this what I understand is that sending the message 'class' to a class name returns an object of that type?

So following this logic, would

Square* sqaure = [[Square alloc] init];
               // equivalent to 
Square* square = [Square class];

[dljeffery]

No, [Square class] would return the class object Square, not an instance of Square.

The docs use the "class" message in the examples for calling isKindOfClass and isMemberOfClass. I'm not sure that the "class" message would have any other valid use.