Book Image

Mastering Swift 5 - Fifth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Swift 5 - Fifth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Over the years, the Mastering Swift book has established itself amongst developers as a popular choice as an in-depth and practical guide to the Swift programming language. The latest edition is fully updated and revised to cover the new version: Swift 5. Inside this book, you'll find the key features of Swift 5 easily explained with complete sets of examples. From the basics of the language to popular features such as concurrency, generics, and memory management, this definitive guide will help you develop your expertise and mastery of the Swift language. Mastering Swift 5, Fifth Edition will give you an in-depth knowledge of some of the most sophisticated elements in Swift development, including protocol extensions, error handling, and closures. It will guide you on how to use and apply them in your own projects. Later, you'll see how to leverage the power of protocol-oriented programming to write flexible and easier-to-manage code. You will also see how to add the copy-on-write feature to your custom value types and how to avoid memory management issues caused by strong reference cycles.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)

Generics

My first experience with generics was back in 2004, when they were first introduced in the Java programming language. I can still remember picking up my copy of The Java Programming Language, Fourth Edition, which covered Java 5 and reading about Java's implementation of generics. Since then, I have used generics in several projects, not only in Java but also in other languages. If you are familiar with generics in other languages, such as Java, the syntax that Swift uses will be very familiar to you. Generics allow us to write very flexible and reusable code; however, just like with subscripts, we need to make sure that we use them properly and do not overuse them.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What are generics?
  • How to create and use generic functions?
  • How to create and use generic types?
  • How to use associated types with protocols?
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