Book Image

Swift 4 Programming Cookbook

Book Image

Swift 4 Programming Cookbook

Overview of this book

Swift 4 is an exciting, multi-platform, general-purpose programming language. Being open source, modern and easy to use has made Swift one of the fastest growing programming languages. If you interested in exploring it, then this book is what you need. The book begins with an introduction to the basic building blocks of Swift 4, its syntax and the functionalities of Swift constructs. Then, introduces you to Apple's Xcode 9 IDE and Swift Playgrounds, which provide an ideal platform to write, execute, and debug the codes thus initiating your development process. Next, you'll learn to bundle variables into tuples, set order to your data with an array, store key-value pairs with dictionaries and you'll learn how to use the property observers. Later, explore the decision-making and control structures in Swift and learn how to handle errors in Swift 4. Then you'll, examine the advanced features of Swift, generics and operators, and then explore the functionalities outside of the standard library, provided by frameworks such as Foundation and UIKit. Also, you'll explore advanced features of Swift Playgrounds. At the end of the book, you'll learn server-side programming aspect of Swift 4 and see how to run Swift on Linux and then investigate Vapor, one of the most popular server-side frameworks for Swift.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Nested types

In Objective-C, all objects are at the top level, and given global scope, they can be said to be in the same namespace. This is one reason for the convention among Objective-C developers, including Apple, to prefix their class names with two-or-three letter identifiers.

These prefix characters allow similarly named classes from different frameworks to be differentiated, for example, UIView from UIKit and SKView from SpriteKit. Swift solves this problem by allowing types to be nested within other types, providing namespacing with nested types and modules.

Getting ready

Any type can be defined as being nested within another type. This allows us to tightly associate one type with another, in addition to providing...