There is now a tidal wave of books being released on Apple’s new Swift programming language. Here, I’m going to review iOS 8 for Programmers: An App-Driven Approach with Swift (3rd Edition) (Deitel Developer Series)
I have a hardcopy of the book, so I cannot speak about the quality of the ebook versions. The same content of course, but I know from producing my own epub books that the formatting can be tedious and error prone.
Readers can download a zip of the code examples from the Deitel website. Unfortunately, you have to “register” on their site to get the download link as if we are still living in 1995.
First off, the audience for the book. It is aimed at experienced programmers, especially those with experience in an object oriented language. If you are just starting out, this is probably not the book for you. If that is the case, I’d suggest Swift for Absolute Beginners
As the title suggests, this is not a Swift tutorial. Instead, you are introduced to Swift’s features by writing several toy apps. That’s what “app-driven approach” means. I really hate books and course materials that are simple laundry lists of features. In fact, over 90% of the live courses I’ve taught over the past 25 years ignored the printed course materials (unless it was one I authored :)). Laundry lists are easy on the author but hard on the learner. This app-driven approach gets closer to enabling real learning. If the learner has a question in their head while working through the material, and then see the answer a few pages later, that is excellent. Motivational seeding is what I call that. So, you will get a decent foundation in Swift, but you will not see any advanced topics. The things that I’ve banged my head against the wall with, such as interfacing with legacy APIs such are Core Audio or Core MIDI, are not touched upon. I don’t mean those APIs in particular, but interfacing with any of the legacy APIs. As is common with most iOS development books, unit testing is not covered.
The Apps
These are the Apps that the learner will build:
- Welcome App
- Tip Calculator App
- Twitter Searches App
- Flag Quiz App
- Cannon Game App
- Doodlz App
- Address Book App
Each App introduces a new iOS and/or Swift feature. For example, the Cannon Game touches on Sprite Kit and the Address Book uses Core Data.
I like the format of each chapter. Each begins with a list of objectives followed by an outline. The page header for the page on the right will be an outline title. I wonder if the ebook formats the outline items as links. This seems to be a small thing, but after you’ve gone through a book, you might need to find something. This helps a lot. It also sets your expectations for what is going to be accomplished in the chapter. Not surprising, the end of each chapter has a “wrap up” telling you what they just told you. Also useful for answering “In what chapter was that thing on X covered?”
Sometimes, the author is a bit lazy. For example, section 4.3.13 talks about external parameter names. The paradigm is given but no code example. Thanks for the Amo, Amas, Amat, but where is the example sentence? Amo libri huius? Also, the Alert controller code on page 148 has a memory leak when you access the text fields in that manner. The Twitter app sidesteps Twitter’s RESTful API and uses a WebView instead. I guess NSURLSession would be too complicated or having to authenticate would be too much trouble.
There are a decent number of technologies touched upon. iCloud, Sprite Kit, Social Framework, Core Data, etc.
The book ends with a chapter on the business end and the App Store. Most developers will tell you that the coding is easier than getting it onto the App Store. Useful information is provided here.
Summary
If you are an experienced programmer, this is a good book to get to get a decent foundation in iOS development and the Swift language.
The softcover book is around 40 bucks.
You can get more information on the InformIT site.
Thanks!