Today we’re releasing the second edition of our book Advanced Swift.
I’m excited to say “our book” because I became Chris Eidhof’s new co-author (yay!) when Airspeed Velocity joined the Swift team at Apple (double yay!).
Advanced Swift is meant for people who have read Apple’s The Swift Programming Language and now want to dive deeper. It’s a book about Swift the language, not about iOS or macOS programming.
The new edition has been thoroughly updated for Swift 3, but we didn’t stop there. We revised the entire book, rewrote sections that needed clarifying and came up with better examples. We also added a bunch of new content, primarily in the chapters on collections, functions, and generics.
Advanced Swift playground book (beta)
If you buy the digital version of Advanced Swift, we have one more special surprise for you: we’re making the entire book available for Apple’s Swift Playgrounds iPad app. This means you can read the book on your iPad and run (and change) the sample code directly inline:
We’re really excited about the possibilities of playgrounds for learning, and we’re thrilled to be offering Advanced Swift as a playground book. But keep in mind that we’re announcing this as a beta version — there might still be some kinks to work out, and not all of the sample code compiles on iOS (e.g. because it relies on a C library that we can’t ship with the playground). Also, don’t expect an immersive experience with lots of graphics and animation — our playground book is essentially a wall of text with some diagrams sprinkled in.
We’d love to hear your feedback on this.
How to buy
You can buy Advanced Swift as an e-book through the objc.io website. The e-book download includes PDF, ePub, and Mobi (Kindle) files, all DRM-free. This version also includes the playground book for the Swift Playgrounds app on iPad. If you have bought the first edition e-book, this is a free update for you.
If you prefer a printed book, you can order the paperback version on Amazon (.com, .co.uk, .de).
Working on Advanced Swift has been a huge learning experience for me, both as a writer and a programmer. I’m very proud of the result and excited to be sharing it with you now. If you decide to buy the book, thank you! I hope you enjoy it.