Sign In Start Free Trial
Account

Add to playlist

Create a Playlist

Modal Close icon
You need to login to use this feature.
  • Book Overview & Buying Mastering Swift 5.3
  • Table Of Contents Toc
  • Feedback & Rating feedback
Mastering Swift 5.3

Mastering Swift 5.3

By : Jon Hoffman
3.7 (15)
close
close
Mastering Swift 5.3

Mastering Swift 5.3

3.7 (15)
By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Over the years, Mastering Swift has proven itself among developers as a popular choice for an in-depth and practical guide to the Swift programming language. This sixth edition comes with the latest features, an overall revision to align with Swift 5.3, and two new chapters on building swift from source and advanced operators. From the basics of the language to popular features such as concurrency, generics, and memory management, this in-depth guide will help you develop your expertise and mastery of the language. As you progress, you will gain practical insights into some of the most sophisticated elements in Swift development, including protocol extensions, error handling, and closures. The book will also show you how to use and apply them in your own projects. In later chapters, you will understand how to use the power of protocol-oriented programming to write flexible and easier-to-manage code in Swift. Finally, you will learn how to add the copy-on-write feature to your custom value types, along with understanding how to avoid memory management issues caused by strong reference cycles. By the end of this Swift book, you will have mastered the Swift 5.3 language and developed the skills you need to effectively use its features to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
close
close
21
Other Books You May Enjoy
22
Index

Swift features

When Apple first introduced Swift, it said that Swift is Objective-C without the C. This really only tells us half of the story. Objective-C is a superset of C and provides object-oriented capabilities and a dynamic runtime to the C language. This meant that with Objective-C, Apple needed to maintain compatibility with C, which limited the enhancements it could make to the Objective-C language. As an example, Apple could not change how the switch statement functioned and has still maintained compatibility with the C language.

Since Swift does not need to maintain the same C compatibility as Objective-C, Apple was free to add any feature/enhancement to the language. This allowed Apple to include the best features from many of today's most popular and modern languages, such as Objective-C, Python, Java, Ruby, C#, and Haskell.

The following table shows a list of some of the most exciting enhancements that Swift offers compared to the Objective-C language:

Swift feature

Description

Type inference

Swift can automatically deduce the type of a variable or constant, based on the initial value.

Generics

Generics allow us to write code once to perform identical tasks for different types of objects.

Collection mutability

Swift does not have separate objects for mutable or non-mutable containers. Instead, you define mutability by defining the container as a constant or variable.

Closure syntax

Closures are self-contained blocks of functionality that can be passed around and used in our code.

Optionals

Optionals define a variable that might not have a value.

switch statement

The switch statement has been drastically improved. This is one of my favorite improvements.

Tuples

Functions can have multiple return types by using tuples.

Operator overloading

Classes can provide their own implementations of existing operators.

Enumerations with associated values

In Swift, we can do a lot more than just define a group of related values with enumerations.

Protocols and protocol- oriented design

Apple introduced the protocol-oriented programming paradigm with Swift version 2. This is a new way of not only writing applications but also changing how we think about programming. This is discussed in Chapter 10, Protocol-Oriented Design.

Table 1.1: Swift features

Before we begin our journey into the wonderful world of Swift development, let's take a detour and visit a place that I have loved ever since I was a kid: the playground.

Unlock full access

Continue reading for free

A Packt free trial gives you instant online access to our library of over 7000 practical eBooks and videos, constantly updated with the latest in tech
bookmark search playlist download font-size

Change the font size

margin-width

Change margin width

day-mode

Change background colour

Close icon Search
Country selected

Close icon Your notes and bookmarks

Delete Bookmark

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to delete it?
Cancel
Yes, Delete

Confirmation

Modal Close icon
claim successful

Buy this book with your credits?

Modal Close icon
Are you sure you want to buy this book with one of your credits?
Close
YES, BUY