Book Image

Swift Protocol-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Swift Protocol-Oriented Programming - Fourth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Protocol-oriented programming is an incredibly powerful concept at the heart of Swift's design. Swift's standard library was developed using POP techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, it is important for every Swift developer to understand these core concepts and take advantage of them. The fourth edition of this book is improved and updated to the latest version of the Swift programming language. This book will help you understand what protocol-oriented programming is all about and how it is different from other programming paradigms such as object-oriented programming. This book covers topics such as generics, Copy-On-Write, extensions, and of course protocols. It also demonstrates how to use protocol-oriented programming techniques via real-world use cases. By the end of this book, you will know how to use protocol-oriented programming techniques to build powerful and practical applications.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Defining an extension

An extension is defined by using the extension keyword, followed by the name of the type you are extending. We then put the functionality that we are adding to the type between curly brackets. The following example shows how to define an extension:

 extension String { 
    // Add functionality here 
}  

The previous example would add an extension to the String type from the Swift standard library. Since we can extend any type, we can use extensions to add functionality to types from the Swift standard library, types from frameworks, or our own custom types. While we can use extensions to add functionality to our own custom types, it is usually better to add the functionality directly to the type itself. The reason for this is that our code is easier to maintain if all the functionality (code) for our custom types is located together.

If we are adding functionality...