Swift Developer's Cookbook (Includes Content Update Program) (Developer's Library)

tl;drIn sum, if you are a moderately experienced in Objective-C, this petite volume covers basically the same ground as Apple’s Swift Programming Language, but written in a problem-solution style, with the added value of her non-Apple perspective — oh, and did I mention that she does this all in 1/3 of the space (~200 pages to SPL’s 600+). The title “Swift for the Really Impatient” is apparently already taken, but would fit this book quite well. Highly recommended, if you’re her target audience.----Are you an Objective-C developer looking for an advanced primer to dive into Swift? Then look no further. Erica Saudi’s slim volume is densely packed with well-written code that tersely explains (a) how to do Objective-C tasks in Swift syntax, and (b) how to avoid that road, and take advantage of Swift to accomplish those tasks Swift-ly.Those who have read her other books, such as iOS Autolayout Demystified, or follow her blog, know you are in good hands with a professional who has a deep and intimate knowledge of the inner workings of the Cocoa APIs, and like a good tour guide, can point out common hazards to avoid as she takes you on the safe path. Moreover, she provides ‘historical’ context about what came before. And throughout are little gems of humor.*This book is not for everyone, but it may very well be for you. It is certainly not for fresh beginners, and it is not for someone looking to learn iOS programming or APIs. Myself, I have been programming in Objective-C for about a year now, and just completed my first Swift project when I got my hands on the book, which I saw as a time-saving alternative to scouring the tech-blogosphere and weeding out the Swift 1.x stuff from the Swift 2.x. Rather than read it cover to cover, I read the chapter I needed to bone up on, or searched the index — and in this regard, it works quite well, as a ‘cookbook’ should (though it is not really a cookbook, as I've seen the term used, such as in "The iOS Developer's Cookbook" by the same author -- the code provided are mostly of snippet-length).In sum, if you are a moderately experienced in Objective-C, this petite volume covers basically the same ground as Apple’s Swift Programming Language, but written in a problem-solution style, with the added value of her non-Apple perspective — oh, and did I mention that she does this all in 1/3 of the space (~200 pages to SPL’s 600+). The title “Swift for the Really Impatient” is apparently already taken, but would fit this book quite well. Highly recommended, if you’re her target audience.Note that this cookbook is focused on *Swift*, _not_ Cocoa, as in the iOS Developer’s Cookbook’s by the same publisher. Double-check the table of contents to make sure it covers the topics you require.*My favorite:"Uppercase function names are immediately distinguishable from methods but are currently out of fashion. This practice was quite common up to and including name-spacing, when it suddenly went extinct. It’s like a million capitalized voices cried out and were suddenly silenced.”(p.68 / Kindle Locations 2086-2088).Full Disclosure: I purchased a dead tree copy of the book for my own edification. Subsequently, I was offered a free copy in exchange for an honest review, which got me the electronic version. So, to be honest, I have issues with all programming e-books and how they fail to display code in a helpful manner (read: syntax highlighting!). Dead trees win in that regard, which boggles the mind. But I love having the e-book for searching. I would buy far more books like these if there was an e/tree bundle that was *less* than, say, the price of two full copies!

Lots of well written tips and tricks for idiomatic swift programming. Getting a book on best practices is a win for writing reliable and readable swift code.

There are some real gems here.

Over the past year, as Apple recommended, I've read their Swift documentation and did many of the exercises. I watched, and did the exercises in, the most recent Stanford iOS video course. With all of this great documentation, I wasn’t sure that a book could add much more useful information, but Erica Sadun’s book has already been helpful. She covers lots of idioms, quirks, and subtleties that would bog down Apple's core documentation and other sources of information. I'm sure there are other books that cover such concepts, but for a beginner to Swift, it's a good selection.Though I'm new to Swift, I really appreciate the power it provides by building on what has been learned about software and how it made and used. Very little was known about such things when I bought my first 128K Mac as my graduation gift to myself for getting my BSEE and to learn 68000 assembly language. I've since made money programming in C, Forth, PostScript, C++, HyperCard, SuperCard, Visual Basic, PL/1, Java, JavaScript, and a few proprietary languages. Sadun's book touches on many of the concepts that Swift borrows from these languages.I'm okay with it being a thin cookbook. The examples she provides cover quite a few situations that I've encountered. I appreciate not having to wade through many examples that are too similar to each other. I prefer a cookbook that doesn't cover everything over programming cookbooks that include many poorly designed and coded examples.

The book spends too much time trying to convince the reader that learning Swift is worthwhile and apologizing about the state of Swift. I would expect that anybody who would buy this book would have already decided for themselves if they were going to learn Swift.There are some good parts to the book that are insightful and are worth reading but the book is not organized in a way that you would be able to find these tidbits by browsing the index or table of contents. You only get value from the book by reading it cover to cover. Fortunately the distance between the covers is small compared to other books on the same subject matter.If you are looking to read all you can on the Swift language this book will be worthwhile but it is not a good starting point nor a good reference.

An introductory book to concepts from the Swift programming language, it thoroughly touches base in most of the important and useful topics for the language. It is good in the sense that, if you come from an Obj-C background, you'll be up to speed fairly quickly and understand what Swift is about. It includes a lot of "recipes" for the general Swift language, but is a bit lacking on platform specific ones, as I've seen just a few focusing on iOS or OS X, which I would have liked a bit more.The chapter on debugging is very good and had some stuff I haven't read elsewhere (mostly on the QuickLook front), and includes useful information on the important subject of documenting your code, which a lot of the material out there just plain overlooks.On the presentation side (epub version), I would have liked for the code to have some kind of syntax highlighting, otherwise the code is sometimes hard to follow, and syntax highlighting would have gone long ways in keeping me engaged while reading code. Fortunately, there's an appendix that has all the code snippets in the book by themselves, kind of like a screenshot of the code, still without highlighting, but in a way that the epub renderer doesn't get in the way.Like I mentioned before, I would have liked this book to go a bit deeper into recipes for both iOS and OSX, but all in all, it is a good read that will introduce you the Swift programming language and teach you a thing or two even if you are a seasoned veteran on the language.

Downloaded the Kindle free sample and was hooked. Professional language, always straightforward and to the point; none of the bantering "you wish you could...", "well here's how easy it is" sort of stuff you get in some text books. Intended for Xcode 7, so I thought I'd wait for the Xcode 8 version before buying the paper version, but impatience made me buy the current Kindle version. Chapters on optionals and closures made me a lot more confident with them, chapter on protocols a whole new world. It's a book you'll want to have handy to flip through which will be much easier with a paper version.