Book Image

Learn Swift by Building Applications

By : Emil Atanasov, Giordano Scalzo, Emil Atanasov
Book Image

Learn Swift by Building Applications

By: Emil Atanasov, Giordano Scalzo, Emil Atanasov

Overview of this book

Swift Language is now more powerful than ever; it has introduced new ways to solve old problems and has gone on to become one of the fastest growing popular languages. It is now a de-facto choice for iOS developers and it powers most of the newly released and popular apps. This practical guide will help you to begin your journey with Swift programming through learning how to build iOS apps. You will learn all about basic variables, if clauses, functions, loops, and other core concepts; then structures, classes, and inheritance will be discussed. Next, you’ll dive into developing a weather app that consumes data from the internet and presents information to the user. The final project is more complex, involving creating an Instagram like app that integrates different external libraries. The app also uses CocoaPods as its package dependency manager, to give you a cutting-edge tool to add to your skillset. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to model real-world apps in Swift.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
5
Adding Interactivity to Your First App

Swift Package Manager

Every new language comes with a package manager for easy dependency support. Swift Package Manager (SPM) is a tool that is integrated with the Swift system for distributing your Swift projects and using shared ones. It works on Linux and macOS, which makes it the best choice for developers writing backend applications using Swift.

We already know that the code in Swift is organized in modules. Sharing modules which solve common tasks is a breeze with SPM. We need to define which modules we want to use in our project and then they will be cooked for us.

In Package.swift, we describe all dependencies (where the source code is located, external dependencies) and what kind of project we are building. Here is an example of a manifest file:

// swift-tools-version:4.0
import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
name: "Weather Service",
products: [
...