Mastering Swift 5.3: Upgrade your knowledge and become an expert in the latest version of the Swift programming language, 6th Edition

BASICS ARE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL

Looking for a book underwriting the more intermediate and advanced approaches to programming with Swift, I was initially concerned with the beginner-level difficulty of first few chapters of actual Programming content. However, I was even surprised the odd piece of Swift functionality in these first chapters that had not as yet come across.My concerns weren’t long-lived. The book, although not in great depth, covers a large variety of programming paradigms and concepts and how they are approached with, Swift 5. Overall, I’m glad I bought this book.

The organization of topics was quite good, as well as explanations, descriptions, and examples illustrating the concepts of Swift. There are nice chapters on extralingual topics such as design patterns and protocal-oriented programming.However, I had many issues with the text:* It is littered with errors, both in the text and in the code. For example the phrase "... throws an error" was used (which is a runtime event), where "... causes a compile-time error" should have been used. And a typical spelling error: "Warth" appears where "Earth" should be. The pages are filled with these kinds of errors.* The index is *very* short, compared to other language books I have. In a reference book, a good index is critical.* In the String section there was no coverage of the Substring struct, which deserves discussion because it does not occur in some other languages.* Example code blocks have comments describing the results. Then paragraphically, the *exact* same thing is said. It is redundant (and painful).* Oddities abound. For example, for enums, he first says it is preferred to begin enum values with lowercase. Then he proceeds to define most examples with uppercase!?* There are fullscreen images of the Xcode editor to show code and run time results, but the font is too small to read!! This occurs frequently in chapter 1, but thankfully less so in the rest of the book. Actually, Swift is available on Linux and Windows, so I would prefer a platform-neutral book, using comments and text to explain the concepts, instead of utilizing the Apple-only Xcode tool.* There are so many of the "next we'll look at xxx yyy", followed immediately with a section title of "Xxx Yyyy". Some may like that, but to me it is just noise.This could be a *great* book, if efforts are made to improve these things.

This is a clear, concise and easily readable presentation of the basics of Swift, certainly usable by anyone familiar with the basics of modern computer-languages. (It is, after all, a description of Swift, not an introductory CS course.)The only problem is that the index (of only 8 pages) is useless for finding anything other than the most rudimentary items. For example, there is no entry for the key word "mutating." This is a situation I've found to be common with books published by "Packt>".Complete answers have to be done with Internet searches, or (as is perhaps the goal of such under-documentation) by subscribing to packtpub.com.

Great reference book, but definitely not for individuals just getting started in programming.

I have purchased a copy of almost all of the Mastering Swift books because I find them incredibly informative. The author does a great job of teaching Swift while also covering the most important new features of the language. While the first few chapters are geared towards someone first learning the language, the later chapters are a must read for anyone that wants to master the Swift Language. From Protocol Oriented Programming techniques and Copy-on-Write to Concurrency and Generics, this book covers almost all of the advanced topicsWhen I first received my copy of this book, I went right to the Advanced Operators chapters which is one of the two new chapters added in this revision. This is one of the few books that cover details like the Bitwise operators and custom operators. This chapter is a great addition to the book.Just like previous revisions of this book, I consider this a most read for beginners to the Swift Language and also for experience developers that want to take their knowledge to the next level.