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Learning Swift

By : Andrew J Wagner

4.8 (5)

Learning Swift

4.8 (5)

By: Andrew J Wagner

Overview of this book

If you are looking to build iOS or OS X apps using the most modern technology, this book is ideal for you. You will find this book especially useful if you are new to programming or if you have yet to develop for iOS or OS X.

Preface

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

1. Introducing Swift

1. Introducing Swift

Defining our goals for this book

Setting up the development environment

Running our first Swift code

Understanding playgrounds

Learning with this book

Summary

2. Building Blocks – Variables, Collections, and Flow Control

2. Building Blocks – Variables, Collections, and Flow Control

Core Swift types

Swift's type system

Printing on the console

Control flow

Functions

Bringing it all together

Summary

3. One Piece at a Time – Types, Scopes, and Projects

3. One Piece at a Time – Types, Scopes, and Projects

Structs

Classes

Enumerations

Projects

Extensions

Scope

Access control

Summary

4. To Be or Not to Be – Optionals

4. To Be or Not to Be – Optionals

Introducing optionals

Unwrapping an optional

Optional chaining

Implicitly unwrapped optionals

Debugging optionals

The underlying implementation

Summary

5. A Modern Paradigm – Closures and Functional Programming

5. A Modern Paradigm – Closures and Functional Programming

Functional programming philosophy

Closures

Building blocks of functional programming in Swift

Lazy evaluation

Curried functions

Summary

6. Make Swift Work for You – Protocols and Generics

6. Make Swift Work for You – Protocols and Generics

Protocols

Defining a generic

Extending the existing generics

Putting protocols and generics to use

Summary

7. Everything is Connected – Memory Management

7. Everything is Connected – Memory Management

How data is stored in a computer

Value types versus reference types

Automatic reference counting

Strong reference cycles

Lost objects

Summary

8. Writing Code the Swift Way – Design Patterns and Techniques

8. Writing Code the Swift Way – Design Patterns and Techniques

What is a design pattern?

Behavioral patterns

Structural patterns

Creational patterns

Using associated values effectively

Extending system types to reduce code

Lazy properties

Summary

9. Harnessing the Past – Understanding and Translating Objective-C

9. Harnessing the Past – Understanding and Translating Objective-C

Swift's relationship with Objective-C

The history of Objective-C

Constants and variables

Containers

Control flow

Functions

Types

Projects

Calling Objective-C code from Swift

Using functions

Summary

10. A Whole New World – Developing an App

10. A Whole New World – Developing an App

Conceptualizing the app

Setting up the app project

Configuring the user interface

Running the app

Allowing picture taking

Temporarily saving a photo

Populating our photo grid

Refactoring to respect Model-View-Controller

Permanently saving a photo

Summary

11. What's Next? Resources, Advice, and Next Steps

11. What's Next? Resources, Advice, and Next Steps

Apple's documentation

Forums and blogs

Prominent figures

Podcasts

Summary

Index

Index

Customer Reviews

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Putting protocols and generics to use

One cool thing about Swift is that it contains generators and sequences. They provide an easy way to iterate over a list of values. Ultimately, they boil down to two different protocols: GeneratorType and SequenceType. If you implement the SequenceType protocol in your custom types, it allows you to use the for-in loop over an instance of your type. In this section, we will look at how to do that.

Generators

The most critical part of this is the GeneratorType protocol. Essentially, a generator is an object that you can use repeatedly to ask for the next object in a series until there are no objects left. Most of the time, you can simply use an array for this, but it is not always the best solution. For example, you can even make a generator that is infinite.

There is a famous infinite series of numbers called the Fibonacci Sequence where every number in the series is the sum of the two previous numbers. This is especially famous because it is found everywhere...

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