Swift is Apple's new programming language that was introduced at the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2014, alongside the integrated development environment Xcode 6 and iOS 8. Swift was arguably the most significant announcement at WWDC 2014, and very few people, including Apple
insiders, were aware of the project's existence prior to it being announced.
At WWDC 2015, Apple made another big splash when they announced Xcode 7 and Swift 2, which is a major enhancement to the Swift language. During WWDC, Chris Lattner said that a lot of the enhancements were based on direct feedback that Apple received from the development community.
Swift can be thought of as Objective-C reimagined using modern concepts and safe programming patterns. In Apple's own words, Swift is like "Objective-C without the C". Chris, the creator of Swift, said that Swift took language ideas from Objective-C, Rust, Haskell, Ruby, Python, C#, CLU, and far too many others to list.
Apple has also stated that "Swift is a successor to the C and Objective-C languages". Therefore, it is imperative for iOS and OS X developers who want to keep their skills up to date to not only learn, but also master the Swift programming language.
The first five chapters of this book will introduce the reader to the Swift programming language. These chapters will give the reader a solid understanding of the Swift programming language. The remainder of the book will cover more advanced topics such as concurrency, network development, protocol extensions, and design patterns that will help the reader master this language.
This book is written in an example-based approach where each topic covered is backed by examples, which are written to reinforce the topic and show how to implement it within the reader's code.
