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

Functions

When I first learned to program with BASIC, my first few programs were written in one long block of code. I quickly realized that I was repeating the same code over and over. I thought that there must be a better way to do this, which was when I learned about subroutines and functions. Functions are one of the key concepts that you need to understand to write good code.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • What are functions?
  • How to return values from a function
  • How to use parameters in a function
  • What are variadic parameters?
  • What are inout parameters?

In Swift, a function is a self-contained block of code that performs a specific task. Functions are generally used to logically break our code into reusable named blocks. The function's name is used to call the function.

When we define a function, we can also optionally define one or more parameters. Parameters are named values that are passed into...