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

Chapter 8. Writing Safer Code with Availability and Error Handling

When I first started writing applications with Objective-C, one of the most noticeable deficiencies was the lack of exception handling. Most modern programming languages, such as Java and C# use try-catch blocks or something similar to handle exceptions. While Objective-C did have the try-catch block, it wasn't used within the Cocoa frameworks themselves and it never really felt like a true part of the language. I do have significant experience in C, so I was able to understand how Apple's frameworks received and responded to errors. And to be honest, I actually preferred this method even though I had grown accustomed to exception handling with Java and C#. When Swift was first introduced, I was hoping that Apple would put true error handling into the language, and so we would have the option of using it. However, it was not in the initial release of Swift. Finally, when Swift 2 was released, Apple did add extra error handling...