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)
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Index

Using the Operation and OperationQueue types

The Operation and OperationQueue types, working together, provide us with an alternative to GCD for adding concurrency to our applications. Operation queues are part of the Foundation framework and function like dispatch queues as they are a higher level of abstraction over GCD.

We define the tasks (operations) that we wish to execute and then add the tasks to the operation queue. The operation queue will then handle the scheduling and execution of tasks. Operation queues are instances of the OperationQueue class and operations are instances of the Operation class.

An operation represents a single unit of work or a task. The Operation type is an abstract class that provides a thread-safe structure for modeling the state, priority, and dependencies. This class must be subclassed to perform any useful work; we will look at how to subclass this class in the Subclassing the Operation class section of this chapter.

Apple provides...