Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By : Jon Hoffman
Book Image

Swift 4 Protocol-Oriented Programming - Third Edition

By: Jon Hoffman

Overview of this book

Swift has become the number one language used in iOS and macOS development. The Swift standard library is developed using protocol-oriented programming techniques, generics, and first-class value semantics; therefore, every Swift developer should understand these powerful concepts and how to take advantage of them in their application design. This book will help you understand the differences between object-oriented programming and protocol-oriented programming. It will demonstrate how to work with protocol-oriented programming using real-world use cases. You will gain a solid knowledge of the various types that can be used in Swift and the differences between value and reference types. You will be taught how protocol-oriented programming techniques can be used to develop very flexible and easy-to-maintain code. By the end of the book, you will have a thorough understanding of protocol-oriented programming and how to utilize it to build powerful and practical applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Summary


Generics in Swift are extremely powerful. With protocols, we are able to use a common interface to interact with various types that conform to the protocol. Also, when we use generics, we are able to create generic types that can accept instances of any type. When we combine protocols and generics, as we saw with the List types in this chapter, we are able to create very powerful libraries that do not only meet our present needs, but also our future needs.

Apple has stated that Generics are one of the most powerful features of Swift and that much of the Swift standard library is built using generics. You should keep this in mind as you are writing your applications.

Since protocol-oriented programming was introduced, there has been a lot of comparison between it and object-oriented programming. In order to do a proper comparison between the two, let's briefly take a look at object-oriented design with Swift.