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)

What are classes and structures?

In Swift, classes and structures are very similar. If we really want to master Swift, it is very important to not only understand what makes classes and structures so similar, but to also understand what sets them apart, because they are the building blocks of our applications. Apple describes them as follows:

Classes and structures are general-purpose, flexible constructs that become the building blocks of your program's code. You define properties and methods to add functionality to your classes and structures by using the already familiar syntax of constants, variables, and functions.

Let's begin by taking a quick look at some of the similarities between classes and structures.

Similarities between classes and structures

...