Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By : Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento
Book Image

Mastering macOS Programming.

By: Stuart Grimshaw, Gregory Casamento

Overview of this book

macOS continues to lead the way in desktop operating systems, with its tight integration across the Apple ecosystem of platforms and devices. With this book, you will get an in-depth knowledge of working on macOS, enabling you to unleash the full potential of the latest version using Swift 3 to build applications. This book will help you broaden your horizons by taking your programming skills to next level. The initial chapters will show you all about the environment that surrounds a developer at the start of a project. It introduces you to the new features that Swift 3 and Xcode 8 offers and also covers the common design patterns that you need to know for planning anything more than trivial projects. You will then learn the advanced Swift programming concepts, including memory management, generics, protocol orientated and functional programming and with this knowledge you will be able to tackle the next several chapters that deal with Apple’s own Cocoa frameworks. It also covers AppKit, Foundation, and Core Data in detail which is a part of the Cocoa umbrella framework. The rest of the book will cover the challenges posed by asynchronous programming, error handling, debugging, and many other areas that are an indispensable part of producing software in a professional environment. By the end of this book, you will be well acquainted with Swift, Cocoa, and AppKit, as well as a plethora of other essential tools, and you will be ready to tackle much more complex and advanced software projects.
Table of Contents (28 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Dedication
Preface
18
LLDB and the Command Line

Structs, classes, and other data structures


Ways of defining and handling structured data are an important part of any programming language that supports object-oriented programming. Swift has extended the patterns typical of Objective C, Java, and the like, to include structures that are passed by value, called structs, and those that are passed by reference, called classes (see Value and reference types in this chapter). There is also the much lighter-weight tuple, which offers a kind of bridge between data structures and collection types such as dictionaries.

As well as the fact that structs are value types and classes are reference types, there are a few other points of departure, but the two structures have a lot more similarities than they do differences.

Structs

A Swift struct is basically a group of data, organized into properties, as well as methods that do something to or with those properties. There is more to come, but we'll start there for the sake of simplicity.

Let's set up a...