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>
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Mastering Swift 2
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Free Chapter
1
Taking the First Steps with Swift
2
Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators
Index

Summary


In today's world, it is essential that a developer have a good working knowledge of network development. In this chapter, we saw how to use Apple's NSURLSession API, with other classes, to connect to HTTP 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 saw 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 essential to know whether we have a network connection and what type of connection it is.

We ended the chapter discussing RSNetworking2, which is an open source network library, written entirely in Swift, that I maintain. RSNetworking2 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...