Book Image

Mastering Swift 3

Book Image

Mastering Swift 3

Overview of this book

Swift is the definitive language of Apple development today. It’s a vital part of any iOS and OS X developer’s skillset, helping them to build the most impressive and popular apps on the App Store—the sort of apps that are essential to iPhone and iPad users every day. With version 3.0, the Swift team have added new features to improve the development experience—making it easier to get the results you want and customers expect. Inside, you’ll find the key features of Swift 3.0 and quickly learn how to use the newest updates to your development advantage. From Objective-C interoperability to ARC, to closures and concurrency, this advanced Swift guide will develop your expertise and make you more fluent in this vital programming language. We give you in-depth knowledge of some of the most sophisticated elements of Swift development including protocol extensions, error-handling, design patterns, and concurrency, and guide you on how to use and apply them in your own projects. You'll see how even the most challenging design patterns and programming techniques can be used to write cleaner code and to build more performant iOS and OS X applications. By the end of this book, you’ll have a handle on effective design patterns and techniques, which means you’ll soon be writing better iOS and OS X applications with a new level of sophistication and control.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Mastering Swift 3
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

Summary


In this chapter, we saw that we can define a closure just like we can define an Int or String type. We can assign closures to a variable, pass them as an argument to functions, and also return them from functions.

Closures capture store references to any constants or variables from the context in which the closure was defined. We do have to be careful with this functionality to make sure that we do not create a strong reference cycle, which would lead to memory leaks in our applications.

Swift closures are very similar to blocks in Objective-C, but they have a much cleaner and more eloquent syntax. This makes them a lot easier to use and understand.

Having a good understanding of closures is vital to mastering the Swift programming language and will make it easier to develop great applications that are easy to maintain. They are also essential for creating first class frameworks that are easy to both use and maintain.

The three use cases that we saw in this chapter are by no means the...