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)

Summarizing protocol-oriented programming and object-oriented programming

In this chapter and Chapter 6, Object-Oriented Programming before it, we learned how Swift can be used as both an object-oriented programming language and a protocol-oriented programming language. In these chapters, we discovered that there are two major differences between the two designs.

The first major difference is that with a protocol-oriented design, we should start with the protocol rather than a superclass. We can then use protocol extensions to add functionality to the types that conform to that protocol, or types that conform to protocols that inherit from that protocol. With object-oriented programming, we started with a superclass. When we designed our vehicle types in a protocol-oriented way, we converted the Vehicle superclass from the object-oriented design, to a Vehicle protocol, and then...