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

Swift collection types


A collection is a group or store of data that has a shared significance. Swift provides three native collection types for storing data. These collection types are arrays, sets, and dictionaries. An array stores the data in an ordered list, sets are an unordered collection of unique data, and dictionaries are an unordered collection of key/value pairs. In an array, we access the data by the location (index) in the array; in a set, we tend to iterate over the set; and dictionaries are usually accessed using a unique key.

The data stored in a Swift collection is required to be of the same type. This means, as an example, that we are unable to store a string value and an array of integers. Since Swift does not allow us to mismatch data types in a collection, we can be certain of the data type when we retrieve data from a collection. This is another feature, which on the surface might seem like a shortcoming, but is actually a design feature that helps eliminate common programming...