In today's world, it is essential that a developer has a good working knowledge of network development. In this chapter, we showed you how to use Apple's NSURLSession API, with other classes, to connect to REST-based web services. The NSURLSession API was written as a replacement for the older NSURLConnection API and is now the recommended API to use when making network requests.

We also showed you how to use Apple's system configuration API to figure out what type of network connection we have. If we are developing applications for a mobile device (iPhone, iPod, or iPad), it is e essential to know if we have a network connection and what type of connection it is.

We ended the chapter discussing RSNetworking, which is an open source network library, written entirely in Swift, that I maintain. RSNetworking allows us to very quickly and easily add network functionality to our applications. It also adds an extension to both the UIImageView and UIButton classes to dynamically load images...