The final version of Chris Eidhof and Airspeed Velocity’s Advanced Swift is now available. As the book’s technical reviewer I’m obviously biased, but I highly recommend it to anyone who, after reading Apple’s official Swift book, wants to dive in deeper.

I think Advanced Swift fills a real niche in the Swift community because it is not a book about writing apps for iOS or the Mac in Swift (although the book is certainly relevant to app developers). Instead, the authors focus on the language itself and its standard library, exploring topics deeper than Apple’s language guide can.

The entire book is great, but if I had to pick just two of my favorite parts, it would be the chapter on strings (because strings in Swift are different and the chapter is superbly written) and the two case studies that show how easy it is to wrap a C library in a nice Swift interface. There are so many great C libraries out there that this is going to be a major advantage of Swift in the future, especially when the Swift Package Manager comes out and as people start to use the language for other things than app development.

I really enjoyed working with Chris and Airspeed on the book. In fact, reviewing Advanced Swift and Core Data were some of my favorite projects last year. I learned a lot from the authors in the process, and I hope my contributions helped make the end results a little bit better than they already were.