Swift Pocket Reference

Get quick answers for developing and debugging applications with Swift, Apple’s multi-paradigm programming language. This pocket reference is the perfect on-the-job tool for learning Swift’s modern language features, including type safety, generics, type inference, closures, tuples, automatic memory management, and support for Unicode.

Designed to work with Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, Swift can be used in tandem with Objective-C, and either of these languages can call APIs implemented in the other. Swift is still evolving, but it’s clear that Apple sees it as the future language of choice for iOS and OS X software development.

Topics include:

• Swift’s Run-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL) and interactive playgrounds
• Supported data types, such as strings, arrays, and dictionaries
• Variables and constants
• Program flow: loops and conditional execution
• Classes, structures, enumerations, functions, and protocols
• Closures: similar to blocks in Objective-C and lambdas in C#
• Optionals: values that can explicitly have no value
• Operators, operator overloading, and custom operators
• Access control: restricting access to types, methods, and properties
• Built-in global functions and their parameter requirements

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
2. Conventions Used in This Book
3. Using Code Examples
4. Safari® Books Online
5. How to Contact Us
6. Acknowledgments
7. Getting Started with Swift
8. A Taste of Swift
9. Basic Language Features
10. Types
11. Variables and Constants
12. Tuples
13. Operators
14. Strings and Characters
15. Arrays
16. Dictionaries
17. Functions
18. Closures
19. Optionals
20. Program Flow
21. Classes
22. Structures
23. Enumerations
24. Access Control
25. Extensions
26. Checking and Casting Types
27. Protocols
28. Memory Management
29. Generics
30. Operator Overloading
31. Ranges, Intervals, and Strides
32. Global Functions