Book Image

Mastering Swift 5.3 - Sixth Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Mastering Swift 5.3 - Sixth Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Over the years, Mastering Swift has proven itself among developers as a popular choice for an in-depth and practical guide to the Swift programming language. This sixth edition comes with the latest features, an overall revision to align with Swift 5.3, and two new chapters on building swift from source and advanced operators. From the basics of the language to popular features such as concurrency, generics, and memory management, this in-depth guide will help you develop your expertise and mastery of the language. As you progress, you will gain practical insights into some of the most sophisticated elements in Swift development, including protocol extensions, error handling, and closures. The book will also show you how to use and apply them in your own projects. In later chapters, you will understand how to use the power of protocol-oriented programming to write flexible and easier-to-manage code in Swift. Finally, you will learn how to add the copy-on-write feature to your custom value types, along with understanding how to avoid memory management issues caused by strong reference cycles. By the end of this Swift book, you will have mastered the Swift 5.3 language and developed the skills you need to effectively use its features to build robust applications.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
21
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22
Index

Error Handling and Availability

When I first started writing applications with Objective-C, one of the most noticeable deficiencies was the lack of exception handling. Most modern programming languages, such as Java and C#, use try...catch blocks, or something similar, for exception handling. While Objective-C did have the try...catch block, it wasn't used within the Cocoa framework itself, and it never really felt like a true part of the language. I have significant experience in C, so I was able to understand how Apple's frameworks received and responded to errors. To be honest, I sometimes preferred this method, even though I had grown accustomed to exception handling with Java and C#. When Swift was first introduced, I was hoping that Apple would put true error handling into the language so that we would have the option of using it; however, it was not in the initial release of Swift. It wasn't until Swift 2 was released that Apple added error handling to Swift...