Book Image

Swift Cookbook. - Second Edition

By : Keith Moon, Chris Barker
Book Image

Swift Cookbook. - Second Edition

By: Keith Moon, Chris Barker

Overview of this book

Swift is an exciting, multi-platform, general-purpose programming language, and with this book, you'll explore the features of its latest version, Swift 5.3. The book begins with an introduction to the basic building blocks of Swift 5.3, its syntax, and the functionalities of Swift constructs. You’ll then discover how Swift Playgrounds provide an ideal platform to write, execute, and debug your Swift code. As you advance through the chapters, the book will show you how to bundle variables into tuples or sets, order your data with an array, store key-value pairs with dictionaries, and use property observers. You’ll also get to grips with the decision-making and control structures in Swift, examine advanced features such as generics and operators, and explore functionalities outside of the standard library. Once you’ve learned how to build iOS applications using UIKit, you'll find out how to use Swift for server-side programming, run Swift on Linux, and investigate Vapor. Finally, you'll discover some of the newest features of Swift 5.3 using SwiftUI and Combine to build adaptive and reactive applications, and find out how to use Swift to build and integrate machine learning models along with Apple’s Vision Framework. By the end of this Swift book, you'll have discovered solutions to boost your productivity while developing code using Swift 5.3.
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
12
About Packt

Using protocols to define interfaces

Protocols are a way to describe the interface that a type provides. They can be thought of as a contract, defining how you can interact with instances of that type. Protocols are a great way to abstract the "what" something does from "how" it does it. As we will see in subsequent chapters, Swift adds functionalities to protocols, that make them even more useful and powerful than in many other programming languages.

Getting ready

We will continue to build on examples from the previous recipes, but don't worry if you haven't followed these recipes yet as all the code you need is listed in the upcoming sections.

How to do it...

In the last recipe, we added a method to our Person class that (given the full implementation) would save it to a remote database. This is a very useful functionality, and as we add more features to our app, there will likely be more types that we also want to save to a remote database:

  1. Create a protocol...