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)

Extensions

With extensions, we can add new properties, methods, initializers, and subscripts, or make an existing type conform to a protocol without modifying the source code for the type. One thing to note is that extensions cannot override the existing functionality.To define an extension, we use the extension keyword, followed by the type that we are extending. The following example shows how we would create an extension that extends the string class:

extension String { 
   //add new functionality here 
} 

Let's see how extensions work by adding a reverse() method and a firstLetterproperty to Swift's standard string class:

extension String { 
   var firstLetter: Character? {  
   get { 
         return self.first 
       } 
   } 
 
    func reverse() -> String { 
       var reverse = ""  
       for letter in self { 
           reverse = "\(letter...