Neuburg - Programming iOS 11: dive deep into views, view controllers, and frameworks

• 2017-12-06: First release

Programming iOS 11 is actually the second of a pair with my other book, iOS 11 Programming Fundamentals with Swift; it picks up exactly where the other book leaves off. They complement and supplement one another. The two-book architecture should, I believe, render the size and scope of each book tractable for readers. Together, they provide a complete grounding in the knowledge needed to begin writing iOS apps; thus, when you do start writing iOS apps, youll have a solid and rigorous understanding of what you are doing and where you are heading. If writing an iOS program is like building a house of bricks, iOS 11 Programming Fundamentals with Swift teaches you what a brick is and how to handle it, while Programming iOS 11 hands you some actual bricks and tells you how to assemble them.

Like Homers Iliad, Programming iOS 11 begins in the middle of the story, with the reader jumping with all four feet into views and view controllers.Discussion of the Swift 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, keyvalue observing, memory management, and so on),has been relegated to iOS 11 Programming Fundamentals with Swift.

So if something appears to be missing from this book, thats why! If you start reading Programming iOS 11 and wonder about such unexplained matters as Swift language basics, the UIApplicationMain function, the nib-loading mechanism, Cocoa patterns of delegation and notification, and retain cycles, wonder no longer I dont explain them here because I have already explained them in iOS 11 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.

Heres a summary of the major sections of Programming iOS 11:

• describes views, the fundamental units of an iOS apps interface. Views are what the user can see and touch in an iOS app. To make something appear before the users eyes, you need a view. To let the user interact with your app, you need a view. This part of the book explains how views are created, arranged, drawn, layered, animated, and touched.

• starts by discussing view controllers. Perhaps the most important aspect of iOS programming, view controllers enable views to come and go coherently within the interface, thus allowing a single-windowed app running on what may be a tiny screen to contain multiple screens of material. View controllers are used to manage interface and to respond to user actions; most of your apps code will be in a view controller. This part of the book talks about how view controllers work, and the major built-in types of view controller that iOS gives you. It also describes every kind of view provided by the Cocoa framework the primary building blocks with which youll construct an apps interface.

• surveys the most commonly used frameworks provided by iOS. These are clumps of code, sometimes with built-in interface, that are not part of your app by default, but are there for the asking if you need them, allowing you to work with such things as sound, video, user libraries, maps, and the devices sensors.

• wraps up the book with some miscellaneous but significant topics: files, networking, threading, and how to implement undo.

• summarizes the basic lifetime event messages sent to your app delegate.

• catalogs some useful Swift utility functions that Ive written. My example code takes advantage of these functions, but they arent built into iOS, so you should keep an eye on this appendix, consulting it whenever a mysterious method name appears.