Chapter 1, Exploring Swift's Power and Performance, introduces Swift, its powerful features, its performance, and its interoperability with Objective-C.

Chapter 2, Making a Good Application Architecture in Swift, covers in detail the powerful features of Swift and how to apply them to build a solid application architecture.

Chapter 3, Testing and Identifying Slow Code with the Swift Toolkit, introduces different Swift and Xcode tools for code prototyping, performance measurement, and identifying and improving slow code.

Chapter 4, Improving Code Performance, shows Swift's performance-related details and features and demonstrates how Swift achieves its high performance. This chapter also covers different optimization techniques for improving performance in your applications.

Chapter 5, Choosing the Correct Data Structure, covers different data structures, their features, their performance characteristics, and suggestions on when to apply them.

Chapter 6, Architecting Applications for High Performance, demonstrates different application architecture techniques that allow you to achieve high performance, such as concurrency, avoiding state, and single responsibility.

Chapter 7, The Importance of Being Lazy, covers important techniques for improving an application's performance, such as lazy loading, lazy collections, and evaluation.

Chapter 8, Discovering All the Underlying Swift Power, gives you more details of Swift's structure, its tools, and the compilation process, and gives a better understanding of how Swift achieves its performance.

This book's content and code examples were written using Xcode 7 and Swift 2.0. To follow along with the tutorials, you will need the following:

This book is for developers who already know the basics of Swift and want to learn the more advanced features and tips on how to achieve high performance and build solid applications in Swift. We assume that you are familiar with at least a bit of Mac OS and the Xcode IDE. This book is for everyone who wants to takes their knowledge of Swift to a new level.

Knowledge of iOS or Mac OS programming and Objective-C would be plus, but it's not required.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "First, let's add a nickname to the Person class."

A block of code is set as follows:

var sam = Person(firstName: "Sam", lastName: "Bosh", 
  nickName:"BigSam")
sam = sam.changeNickName("Rockky")

When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items are set in bold:

<type parameter : constraint >

func minElem<T : Comparable>(x: T, _ y: T) -> T {
  return x < y ? x : y
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

(lldb) repl
1> func isAllPositive(ar: [Int]) -> Bool { 
2.   let negatives = ar.filter { $0 < 0 }
3.   return negatives.count == 0
4. }

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "We will choose a Time Profiler template and click on Record."

Feedback from our readers is always welcome. Let us know what you think about this book—what you liked or disliked. Reader feedback is important for us as it helps us develop titles that you will really get the most out of.

To send us general feedback, simply e-mail <[email protected]>, and mention the book's title in the subject of your message.

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