What's in store

This book is divided into four sections. Each section has a short introduction that describes its chapters, their topics and the overarching themes of the section.

Here’s a brief overview of the book's sections:

Section I: Swift Basics

The first section of the book starts at the very beginning of the computing environment: first, how computers work, and then, how Swift's playgrounds feature works. With those logistics out of the way, you'll take a tour of the fundamentals of the Swift language and learn the basics of managing data, structuring your code, performing simple operations and calculations, working with types.

Section II: Collection Types

Stored data is a core component of any app, whether it's a list of friends in your social networking app or a set of unlockable characters in your hit game. In this section, you'll learn how to store collections of data in Swift.

Section III: Building Your Own Types

Swift comes with basic building blocks, but its real power is in the custom things you can build to model parts of your app. Swift has no idea about playable characters and monsters and power-ups, for example — these are things you need to build yourself! You'll learn how to do that in this section.

Section IV: Advanced Topics

The final section of the book covers more advanced topics in Swift. You'll learn about specific things, such as how to handle problems that come up as your code runs, as well as about more general things such as memory management, which will help you understand some of Swift's behind-the-scenes mechanisms.