Mastering Swift 3

Mastering Swift 3 has been released

I wrote the original Mastering Swift book in 2015 and have updated it for each major release of the Swift language.  Today I would like to announce the release of my new book titled Mastering Swift 3.  Mastering Swift 3 has been updated to reflex the changes in Swift with the third release of the language.  You can purchase the book from Amazon.

The following gives an overview of what is covered in Mastering Swift 3:

Chapter 1, Taking the First Steps with Swift, will introduce you to the Swift programming language and discuss what inspired Apple to create Swift. We'll also go over the basic syntax of Swift and how to use Playgrounds to experiment and test Swift code.

Chapter 2, Learning about Variables, Constants, Strings, and Operators, will introduce you to variables and constants in Swift and when to use them. There will be brief overviews of the most common variable types with examples on how to use them. We'll conclude this chapter by showing examples of how to use the most common operators in the Swift language.

Chapter 3, Using Collections and the Tuple type, will explain Swift's array, set, and dictionary collection types and show examples on how to use them. We'll also show how to use the Tuple type in Swift.

Chapter 4, Control Flow and Functions, will show you how to use Swift's control flow statements. These include loops, conditional, and control transfer statements. The second half of the chapter is all about functions.

Chapter 5, Classes and Structures, is dedicated to Swift's classes and structures. We'll look at what makes them similar and what makes them different. We'll also look at access controls. We'll close this chapter out by looking at memory management in Swift so you will understand how ARC works and how to avoid Strong Reference Cycles.

Chapter 6, Using Protocols and Protocol Extensions, will cover both protocols and protocol extensions in detail since protocols are very important to the Swift language, and having a solid understanding of them will help us write flexible and reusable code.

Chapter 7, Protocol Oriented Design, will cover the best practices of Protocol Oriented Design with Swift.  It will be a brief overview of what is covered in my POP book (which will soon be updated for Swift 3).

Chapter 8, Writing Safer Code with Availability and Error Handling, will cover error handling in depth as well as the new availability feature.

Chapter 9, Custom Subscripting, will discuss how we can use custom subscripts in our classes, structures, and enumerations. Subscripts in Swift can be used to access elements in a collection. We can also define custom subscripts for our classes, structures, and enumerations.

Chapter 10, Using Optional Types, will explain what optional types really are, what are the various ways to unwrap them, and optional chaining. For a developer who is just learning Swift, optional types can be one of the more confusing items to learn.

Chapter 11, Working with Generics, will explain how Swift implements generics. Generics allow us to write very flexible and reusable code that avoids duplication.

Chapter 12, Working with Closures, will teach us how to define and use closures in our code. Closures in Swift are similar to blocks in Objective-C except that they have a much cleaner and easier way of using syntax.

Chapter 13, Using Mix and Match, will explain mix and match and demonstrate how we can include Swift code in our Objective-C projects and Objective-C code in our Swift projects. With all of the apps and frameworks written in Objective-C, it was important to allow Swift and Objective-C code to work together.

Chapter 14, Concurrency and Parallelism in Swift, will show how to use both Grand Central Dispatch and Operation Queues to add concurrency and parallelism to our applications. Understanding and knowing how to add concurrency and parallelism to our apps can significantly enhance the user experience.

Chapter 15, Swift Formatting and Style Guide, will define a style guide for the Swift language that can be used as a template for enterprise developers who need to create a style guide since most enterprises have style guides for the various languages that they develop in.

Chapter 16, Swift Core Library, will explore some of the functionality in the Swift core library.  This will include accessing REST services, working with JSON data and the formatting framework. 

Chapter 17, Adopting Design Patterns in Swift, will show you how to implement some of the more common design patterns in Swift. A design pattern identifies a common software development problem and provides a strategy for dealing with it.

If you are new to the Swift programming language and looking for a book to teach you the basics of the language or an intermediate level developer that is looking for a book to teach you some of the advance topics of the language then Mastering Swift 3 may be the book you are looking for.  You can purchase the book from Amazon.