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

Protocols and Protocol Extensions

While watching the presentations from WWDC 2015 about protocol extensions and protocol-oriented programming (POP), I will admit that I was very skeptical. I have worked with object-oriented programming (OOP) for so long that I was unsure whether this new programming paradigm would solve all of the problems that Apple was claiming it would. Since I am not one who lets my skepticism get in the way of trying something new, I set up a new project that mirrored the one I was currently working on, but wrote the code using Apple's recommendations for POP. I also used protocol extensions extensively in the code. I can honestly say that I was amazed by how much cleaner the new project was compared to the original one. I believe that protocol extensions are going to be one of those defining features that set one programming language apart from the rest.

In this chapter, you will learn about the following topics:

  • How are protocols used as...