iOS 11 Swift Programming Cookbook

I was a fan of the O'Reilly cookbooks after the very positive experience with Paul Teetor's R Cookbook and Winston Chang's R Graphics Cookbook. This iOS 11 Swift Programming Cookbook has a very different content philosophy, which renders it virtually useless. Regret buying this book. There are many more useful books and online resources for Swift, including free ones from Apple and iTunes U, so you can pass up on this one.

I think it was in Donald Knuth’s “The Art of Computer Programming” where I first came across the admonition that the best way to learn to write good code is to study well-written code. Computer reference manuals teach you the grammar of the language, but they don’t teach you how to write elegant, efficient, readable, code. That’s true whether you’re writing System/360 Assembler, as I was when I first encountered that statement, or in Swift or any other contemporary environment. The question is,where do you find good code to study?For a long time, and for a lot of us, the answer has been the O’Reilly cookbooks. Many years ago I was advised that the then-new Perl language was ideal for the university “campus wide information system” project I was managing. Studying the Perl reference guides only helped write Perl that looked like C, which wasn’t very good Perl. It was only after I found the Perl Cookbook that I learned to write Perl that looked like Perl, using Perl-specific concepts like implied I/O that made my code more efficient and easier to maintain. Not surprisingly, whenever I’ve had to learn a new language since then (Java, Ruby, etc.) my first step has been to look to see if there’s an O’Reilly cookbook, and there usually is. They’re long on practical examples and short on the kindness of fluff that fill some the pages of so many programming books- endless screen shots, repetition, and so on.This book, the iOS Swift/Xcode book, differs a lot from most of the O’Reilly cookbooks I’ve used in the past in that it’s aimed not at Swift novices, but at programmers who already have a good deal of experience in the Swift environment and need to learn how to take advantage of the new features in iOS 11 and the latest Apple hardware. I’m a newcomer to iOS programming, so the book is currently a bit too advanced for me; I’m going to order O’Reilly’s “iOS 11 Programming Fundamentals” or something similar to get up to speed. But I f you’re already familiar with Swift and Xcode, this is probably a book you need on your shelf.

This book lists a bunch of extremely superficial projects compiled over 3 - 4 weekends maybe with little to no in-depth discussion of any of the technologies touched. Its main bulk - and this is a very slim volume - consists of IDE screenshots. Each topic follows the same script with of couple of simplistic usage scenarios that typically don't even fill an entire page, many screenshots, some code excerpts (and there isn't a lot of code here) and that's that. Your average amateur online tutorial has ten times the amount of depth and consideration. Avoid at all cost - total scam.

This was decent when it first came out but because Swift is continually evolving, it became quickly outdated. This isn't just a problem for this book but for many programming books these days. I find I spend more time looking at Stack Overflow than anything else. I did find some of the examples useful at the time.

Pour moi, ce livre rate complètement sa cible.Il est beaucoup trop orienté sur les détails pour un débutant, et il ne contient rien qu'on ne trouve pas en une simple recherche sur Internet pour les plus connaisseurs. J'ai hésité à le renvoyer, finalement il finira dans la pile des vieux livres de la bibliothèque.On sens également un certain intérêt commercial à vous faire devenir client de travis et autres sites freemium. Bref, déçu.