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
Other Books You May Enjoy
22
Index

Curly brackets

In Swift, unlike other C-like languages, curly brackets are required for conditional statements and loops. In other C-like languages, if there is only one statement to execute for a conditional statement or a loop, curly brackets around that line are optional. This has led to numerous errors and bugs, such as Apple's goto fail bug. When Apple was designing Swift, they decided to introduce the use of curly brackets, even when there was only one line of code to execute. Let's take a look at some code that illustrates this requirement. This first example is not valid in Swift because it is missing the curly brackets; however, it will be valid in most other languages:

if (x > y) 
    x=0

In Swift, you are required to have curly brackets as illustrated in the following example:

if (x > y) { 
    x=0
}