Now Available: Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide, Third Edition

The Swift programming language has been evolving at a staggering rate since it was originally introduced over six years ago.

It has been our greatest passion to help developers learn and stay up to date with Swift programming and iOS development through our books and bootcamps. To share our love of Swift and all of the changes it has seen, we are proud and excited to announce the 3rd edition of Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide!

So, What’s New?

While “Updated for Xcode 12 and Swift 5.3” is absolutely true, it doesn’t tell the whole story of this 460-page tome.

We have made a number of other improvements that we think you will love.

Tools for Standing Alone

After you learn Swift, a great next step is to learn about iOS programming and development (I can recommend a great book on the subject).

No matter what your next step is, you have already learned useful skills by the end of this book. With that in mind, we wrote a brand new chapter about writing command line utilities using Swift’s Argument Parser library.

In addition to giving you the tools to build CLI utility apps for your Mac, the new chapter also introduces some important discussion around the filesystem, project organization, and the modularity of Swift, including how to import external libraries using the Swift Package Manager from within Xcode.

Tools for the Future

Developers wanting to eventually learn SwiftUI will be happy to know that we have included coverage of opaque types and property wrappers in this edition, two language features that enable SwiftUI’s elegant syntax.

We have worked hard to expand our discussion around advanced concepts such as memory management and troubleshooting reference cycles, the polymorphism enabled by Swift’s type system, working with closures, generics, and the important differences between value and reference types in your programs.

Lastly, we have included a discussion of the newer language features which have shifted how we think about our programs, such as the generic Result type.

For Dessert: A Taste of SwiftUI

Speaking of SwiftUI, you didn’t think we would leave that out, did you?

The last chapter of the book is a Big Nerd Ranch take on an introduction to building iOS and macOS apps with the SwiftUI framework.

This new chapter, which replaces the old “First Cocoa App” and “First iOS App” chapters with a single multi-platform iOS/macOS app in SwiftUI, takes care to introduce and explain some of the fundamental building blocks of SwiftUI apps. We also take this opportunity to extend our discussion of the filesystem and saving user data.

We think you’ll like where it takes you.

What’s Next?

We will continue to provide world-class training on how to develop apps for iOS, and we are building a SwiftUI Essentials course which we hope to offer in 2021. We look forward to continuing to engage with you and teach you as Apple’s platforms evolve.

But you can rest assured that as we learn more, we will share our passion and love for the latest Swift developments with you.

Keep your eye on this blog and our social media for more. Happy coding!