Mastering Swift 2

Book Image

Mastering Swift 2

By : Jon Hoffman

Book Image

Mastering Swift 2

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

<p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">At their Worldwide Developer’s conference (WWDC) in 2015, Apple announced Swift 2, a major update to the innovative programming language they first unveiled to the world the year before. Swift 2 features exciting enhancements to the original iteration of Swift, acting, as Apple put it themselves as “a successor to the C and Objective-C languages.” – This book demonstrates how to get the most from these new features, and gives you the skills and knowledge you need to develop dynamic iOS and OS X applications.<br /> </span></p> <p><span id="description" class="sugar_field">Learn how to harness the newest features of Swift 2 todevelop advanced applications on a wide range of platforms with this cutting-edge development guide. Exploring and demonstrating how to tackle advanced topics such as Objective-C interoperability, ARC, closures, and concurrency, you’ll develop your Swift expertise and become even more fluent in this vital and innovative language. With examples that demonstrate how to put the concepts into practice, and design patterns and best practices, you’ll be writing better iOS and OSX applications in with a new level of sophistication and control.</span></p>

Mastering Swift 2

Mastering Swift 2

Credits

About the Author

About the Author

About the Reviewer

About the Reviewer

www.PacktPub.com

www.PacktPub.com

Preface

Free Chapter

Taking the First Steps with Swift

Taking the First Steps with Swift

Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators

Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators

Constants and variables

Using Collections and Cocoa Data Types

Using Collections and Cocoa Data Types

Swift collection types

Using Cocoa data types

Foundation data types

Control Flow and Functions

Control Flow and Functions

What we have learned so far

Putting it all together

Classes and Structures

Classes and Structures

What are classes and structures?

Creating a class or structure

Custom initializers

Overriding methods and properties

Protocol syntax

Memory management

Using Protocols and Protocol Extensions

Using Protocols and Protocol Extensions

Protocols as types

Polymorphism with protocols

Type casting with protocols

Protocol extensions

Writing Safer Code with Availability and Error Handling

Writing Safer Code with Availability and Error Handling

Error handling prior to Swift 2.0

Error handling in Swift 2

The availability attribute

Working with XML and JSON Data

Working with XML and JSON Data

XML and the NSXMLParser class

Using the NSXMLParserDelegate protocol

Parsing XML documents

XML and manually building XML documents

JSON and NSJSONSerialization

Custom Subscripting

Custom Subscripting

Introducing subscripts

Subscripts with Swift arrays

Read and write custom subscripts

Read-only custom subscripts

Calculated subscripts

Subscript values

Subscripts with ranges

External names for subscripts

Multidimensional subscripts

When not to use a custom subscript

Using Optional Types

Using Optional Types

Introducing optionals

The need for optional types in Swift

Optional chaining

Working with Generics

Working with Generics

An introduction to generics

Generic functions

Associated types

Working with Closures

Working with Closures

An introduction to closures

Simple closures

Shorthand syntax for closures

Using closures with Swift's array algorithms

Standalone closures and good style guidelines

Changing functionality

Selecting a closure based on results

Creating strong reference cycles with closures

Using Mix and Match

Using Mix and Match

What is mix and match

Using Swift and Objective-C together in the same project

Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift

Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift

Concurrency and parallelism

Swift Formatting and Style Guide

Swift Formatting and Style Guide

What is a programming style guide?

Your style guide

Network Development with Swift

Network Development with Swift

What is network development?

An overview of the URL session classes

REST web services

Making an HTTP GET request

Making an HTTP POST request

Checking network connection

RSNetworking2 for Swift 2

Adopting Design Patterns in Swift

Adopting Design Patterns in Swift

Value versus reference types

What are design patterns

Creational patterns

Structural design patterns

Behavioral design patterns

Index

Customer Reviews

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Chapter 10. Using Optional Types

When I first started using Swift, the concept that I had the most trouble with was optional types. Coming from an Objective-C, C, Java, and Python background, I was able to relate to most of Swift's features to how things worked in one of the other languages that I knew, but optionals were different. There really was nothing like optionals in the other languages that I used, so it took a lot of reading to fully understand them. While I briefly covered optionals in Chapter 2, Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators, which gave enough of an overview to get started with, we need to cover a lot more information to really understand what optionals are, how to properly use them, and why they are so important in the Swift language.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

An introduction to optional types
The need for optional types in Swift
Unwrapping an optional
Optional binding
Optional chaining