The Swift™ programming language was arguably the most significant announcement at Apple’s 2014 Worldwide Developers Conference. Although apps can still be developed in Objective-C®, Apple says that Swift is its applications programming and systems programming language of the future.
Swift is a contemporary language with simpler syntax than Objective-C. Because Swift is new, its designers were able to include popular programming language features from languages such as Objective-C, Java™, C#, Ruby, Python® and many others. These features include automatic reference counting (ARC), type inference, optionals, String interpolation, tuples, closures (lambdas), extensions, generics, operator overloading, functions with multiple return values, switch statement enhancements and more. We’ve been able to develop apps more quickly in Swift than with Objective-C and the code is shorter, clearer and runs faster on today’s multi-core architectures.
Swift also eliminates the possibility of many errors common in other languages, making your code more robust and secure. Some of these error-prevention features include no implicit conversions, ARC, no pointers, required braces around every control statement’s body, assignment operators that do not return values, requiring initialization of all variables and constants before they’re used, array bounds checking, automatic checking for overflow of integer calculations, and more. You can combine Swift and Objective-C in the same app to enhance existing Objective-C apps without having to rewrite all the code. Your apps will easily be able to interact with the Cocoa®/Cocoa Touch® frameworks, which are largely written in Objective-C.
You can also use the new Xcode playgrounds with Swift. A playground is an Xcode window in which you can enter Swift code that compiles and executes as you type it. This allows you to see and hear your code’s results as you write it, quickly find and fix errors, and conveniently experiment with features of Swift and the Cocoa/Cocoa Touch frameworks.
Practical, Example-Rich Coverage of:
Classes, Objects, Methods, Properties
Initializers, Deinitializers, Bridging
Tuples, Array and Dictionary Collections
Structures, Enumerations, Closures, ARC
Inheritance, Polymorphism, Protocols
Type Methods, Type Properties
Generics; Strings and Characters
Operator Overloading, Operator Functions, Custom Operators, Subscripts
Access Control; Type Casting and Checking
Nested Types, Nested Methods
Optionals, Optional Chaining, Extensions
Xcode, Playgrounds, Intro to Cocoa Touch® with a Fully Coded iOS® 8 Tip Calculator App
Overflow Operators, Attributes, Patterns
