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)

Value versus reference types

Structures are value types. When we pass instances of a structure within our application, we pass a copy of the structure and not the original structure. Classes are reference types; therefore, when we pass an instance of a class within our application, a reference to the original instance is passed. It is very important to understand this difference. We will give a very high-level view here and will provide additional details in Chapter 16, Memory Management.When we pass structures within our application, we are passing copies of the structures and not the original structures. Since the function gets its own copy of the structure, it can change it as needed without affecting the original instance of the structure.When we pass an instance of a class within our application, we are passing a reference to the original instance of the class. Since we&apos...