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

Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators

The first program I ever wrote was written in BASIC and was the typical Hello World application. This application was exciting at first, but the excitement of printing static text wore off pretty quickly. For my second application, I used BASIC's input command to ask the user for a name and then printed out a custom "hello" message with the name they entered. At the age of 12, it was pretty cool to display Hello Han Solo. This application led me to create numerous Mad Libs-style applications that prompted the user for various words, and then put those words into a story that was displayed after the user had entered all the required words. These applications introduced me to, and taught me, the importance of variables. Every useful application I've created since then has used variables.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What are variables and constants?
  • What is the...