Matt Neuburg - Programming iOS 10

by Matt Neuburg

Copyright 2017 Matt Neuburg. All rights reserved.

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• May 2011: First Edition
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ISBN: 978-1-491-97016-4

[LSI]

Aut lego vel scribo; doceo scrutorve sophian.

Sedulius Scottus

On June 2, 2014, Apples WWDC keynote address ended with a shocking announcement: We have a new programming language. This came as a huge surprise to the developer community, which was accustomed to Objective-C, warts and all, and doubted that Apple could ever possibly relieve them from the weight of its venerable legacy. The developer community, it appeared, had been wrong.

Having picked themselves up off the floor, developers immediately began to examine this new language Swift studying it, critiquing it, and deciding whether to use it. My own first move was to translate all my existing iOS apps into Swift; this was enough to convince me that, for all its faults, Swift deserved to be adopted by new students of iOS programming, and that my books, therefore, should henceforth assume that readers are using Swift.

Therefore, Swift is the programming language used throughout this book. Nevertheless, the reader will also need some awareness of Objective-C (including C). The Foundation and Cocoa APIs, the built-in commands with which your code must interact in order to make anything happen on an iOS device, are still written in C and Objective-C. In order to interact with them, you have to know what those languages would expect. For example, in order to pass a Swift array where an Objective-C NSArray is expected, you need to know whats required of an object to be acceptable as an element of an Objective-C NSArray.

If you dont already know the Swift language and how it interacts with Objective-C, youll want to start with my other book, iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift. It is both an introduction and a companion to Programming iOS 10. Like Homers Iliad, Programming iOS 10 begins in the middle of the story, with the reader jumping with all four feet into views and view controllers, and with a knowledge of the language and the Xcode IDE already presupposed. Discussion of the programming language, as well as the Xcode IDE (including the nature of nibs, outlets, and actions, and the mechanics of nib loading), plus the fundamental conventions, classes, and architectures of the Cocoa Touch framework (including delegation, the responder chain, keyvalue coding, memory management, and so on) material that constituted Chapters 113 in the early editions of this book, but whose presence was eventually deemed to be making the book unwieldy in size and scope has now been relegated to iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift.

So if something appears to be missing from this book, thats why! If you start reading Programming iOS 10 and wonder about such unexplained matters as Swift language basics, the UIApplicationMain function, the nib-loading mechanism, Cocoa patterns of delegation and notification, and what a retain cycle is, wonder no longer I dont explain them here because I have already explained them in iOS 10 Programming Fundamentals with Swift. If youre not sufficiently conversant with those topics, Id suggest that you might want to read that book first; you will then be completely ready for this one.