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)

Curly brackets

In Swift, unlike other C-like languages, curly brackets are required for conditional statements and loops. In other C-like languages, if there is only one statement to execute for a conditional statement or a loop, curly brackets around that line are optional. This has led to numerous errors and bugs, such as Apple's goto fail bug. When Apple was designing Swift, they decided to introduce the use of curly brackets, even when there was only one line of code to execute. Let's take a look at some code that illustrates this requirement. This first example is not valid in Swift because it is missing the curly brackets; however, it will be valid in most other languages:

if (x > y)  
    x=0 

In Swift, you are required to have the curly brackets, as illustrated in the following example:

if (x > y) {  
  x=0 
} 
...