Swift

About the Book

Swift for the Really Impatient is the perfect jumpstart to the Swift language for every experienced Objective-C developer. Leading iOS and OS X developers Matt Henderson and Dave Wood help you take full advantage of Swift's powerful innovations, without wasting time on basics you already know.

Through expert code examples and crystal-clear explanations, Henderson and Wood reveal how Swift features improve on Objective-C and show how to make the most of them. You'll quickly master "Swift-er" techniques for using objects, classes, optionals, generics, functions, closures, and more. Each chapter includes hands-on exercises designed to reinforce and deepen your skills.

You'll learn how to re-implement common Objective-C programming solutions in Swift, improving code clarity, power, and performance on both desktop and mobile devices. And, because you probably won't (or can't) abandon Objective-C anytime soon, you'll discover how to use both languages together, smoothly integrate Swift into existing projects and workflows, and gradually move your current code base into the future.

Coverage Includes

• Using Swift's new patterns and concise, expressive syntax to produce safer, more reliable code
• Leveraging the surprising power of Swift's data structures
• Utilizing Swift's type system to help prevent errors common in other languages
• Using optionals to correctly handle invalid, missing, or unknown values
• Implementing generics to reduce duplication, improve power, and simplify maintenance
• Abstracting functionality for reusable code while maintaining type safety
• Isolating code in clean, flexible, low-overhead closures
• Interacting with C and Objective-C APIs
• Combining Swift with Objective-C in the same project
• Avoiding gotchas in importing Objective-C classes to Swift
• Nesting types to improve code clarity
• Creating shared objects with soft singletons
• Managing threading and concurrency with Swift's advanced Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) patterns