Swift Pocket Reference

Get quick answers for developing and debugging applications with Swift, Apple’s multi-paradigm programming language. This pocket reference is the perfect on-the-job tool for learning Swift’s modern language features, including type safety, generics, type inference, closures, tuples, automatic memory management, and support for Unicode.

Designed to work with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, Swift can be used in tandem with Objective-C, and either of these languages can call APIs implemented in the other. Swift is still evolving, but it’s clear that Apple sees it as the future language of choice for iOS and OS X software development.

Topics include:

• Swift’s Run-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) and interactive playgrounds
• Supported data types, such as strings, arrays, and dictionaries
• Variables and constants
• Program flow: loops and conditional execution
• Classes, structures, enumerations, functions, and protocols
• Closures: similar to blocks in Objective-C and lambdas in C#
• Optionals: values that can explicitly have no value
• Operators, operator overloading, and custom operators
• Access control: restricting access to types, methods, and properties
• Built-in global functions and their parameter requirements

Anthony Gray (but you can call him Tony) has a long history working in tertiary education, where he’s provided technical and systems support for academic and research staff, and some very smart students. He loves to teach, with his favorite subjects being Operating Systems, Computer Graphics and Animation with OpenGL, and most recently Mobile Development for iOS. In his spare time, he writes software to scratch his own itch, some of which is available at squidman.net. Secretly he pines for the days when you could hand-code assembler for your 6502, and occasionally writes emulators so he can do just that.