Wednesday 25 May 2016

Book Review - Swift Essentials Second Edition by Dr Alex Blewitt

This is the latest in my series of relatively infrequent book reviews for the British Computer Society: -

Swift Essentials Second Edition by Dr Alex Blewitt

https://www.packtpub.com/application-development/swift-essentials-second-edition

As a non-developer, I was broadly aware of Apple's announcement of Swift at their World-Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in 2014, and had picked up enough to know that Swift was being actively promoted as an alternative to Objective C for iOS and OS X application development.

However, in late 2015, when Apple announced that they were also contributing Swift to the open-source community, which had the added benefit of enabling Swift to be used on the Linux platform, alongside the Apple OS ecosystem, my interest was truly piqued.

Finally, in early 2016, I was hooked in by the announcement of the IBM Swift Sandbox, allowing one to tinker with the language via a web browser, without necessarily needing to install the Apple Xcode development environment on Mac OS X.

Pulling this all together, I was keen to read more about Swift, so the opportunity to read and review this book, Swift Essentials, Second Edition, was a boon.

The author, Dr Alex Blewitt, has written what is, to me, the perfect mixture of a textbook and a tutorial, providing a complete introduction to the language, even for those of us with little previous experience in the Apple development ecosystem.

The book is aimed at those intending to use Swift, either via the open-source Linux implementation or Apple's own Xcode IDE, and assumes no prior experience with iOS or OS X development. However, it does assume that the reader has some prior application development knowledge, most logically with C/C++ or Java.

Having briefly introduced the language, Dr Blewitt fairly quickly launches into an explanation of how Swift data types - integers, floating point, strings, variables and collections. He then uses this as a foundation upon which he builds up the basic structure of a programming language - loops, iterations, functions and error handling.

From there, progress is swiftly made through the command-line interpreters, application compilation and the Swift playground, the latter being a graphical prototyping environment, before launching into "proper" iOS and watchOS app development.

Dr Blewitt does accurately compare and contrast the open-source Linux and Apple XCode approaches to Swift development, making it clear that one does need Xcode in order to develop apps for iOS and watchOS development, whereas one can use the open-source version of the language to create applications for other OS platforms, including Linux and Windows.

To be realistic, I'm unlikely to be entering the world of mobile application development any time soon, but, if I did have such a requirement, this book would be essential as a go-to reference.

At around 250 pages, the book should serve as a perfect introduction to the language, whilst also acting as a good source of information for those wishing to dig deeper into Swift.

In summary, I found this book to be extremely useful as both a tutorial and a reference, and I would recommend it to anyone seeking to acquire more experience with Swift.

As a keen reader, I rate this book 9/10

For the record, I was kindly provided this book by BCS, at no cost to myself.

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