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abelikoff's review against another edition
3.0
I used this book to get up to speed with Swift in order to start building a hobby app for iOS.
THE GOOD. This is not a super long book. It is pretty readable and has tons of examples. If you want to gain a reasonable knowledge of Swift in order to get going, this is a great book to do so (it goes without saying that programming iOS apps requires significantly more knowledge beyond just the language, so reading just this book will not make you an app developer).
This book also has a pretty broad coverage, going from basics to fairly advanced topics like protocol extensions and interfacing with Objective-C.
THE BAD. I think the authors aimed at a very broad audience with this book - from novice programmers to experienced ones. I found the long-winded explanations of rather elementary concepts (OOP, data structures, etc) rather boring. Given the breadth (and relative depth) of material, I don't think this book would be an ideal first book for an aspiring future programmer. Given that, those gentle intros are really wasted on experienced developers (like myself). I also didn't find more depth where I would appreciate it (like discussion around clearly redundant language features - guard/if case/if let, class vars/static vars, computed properties/get accessors - it would be great to have some discussion about the reason for such perceived redundancy and guidelines on using the right tool).
This brings me to another issue I have with the style. Every feature is explained starting with an elementary example and then generally describing it in a more generic way. Personally, I would prefer a concise description of the feature before demonstrating it by an example - I find it easier to understand the feature this way rather then trying to decipher what it would be by going through the example first. But that might be a personal preference.
Bottom line: shortcomings notwithstanding, the book delivered what it promised and it was pretty readable at that. Unless a better choice emerges, definitely recommended as an overview of Swift.
THE GOOD. This is not a super long book. It is pretty readable and has tons of examples. If you want to gain a reasonable knowledge of Swift in order to get going, this is a great book to do so (it goes without saying that programming iOS apps requires significantly more knowledge beyond just the language, so reading just this book will not make you an app developer).
This book also has a pretty broad coverage, going from basics to fairly advanced topics like protocol extensions and interfacing with Objective-C.
THE BAD. I think the authors aimed at a very broad audience with this book - from novice programmers to experienced ones. I found the long-winded explanations of rather elementary concepts (OOP, data structures, etc) rather boring. Given the breadth (and relative depth) of material, I don't think this book would be an ideal first book for an aspiring future programmer. Given that, those gentle intros are really wasted on experienced developers (like myself). I also didn't find more depth where I would appreciate it (like discussion around clearly redundant language features - guard/if case/if let, class vars/static vars, computed properties/get accessors - it would be great to have some discussion about the reason for such perceived redundancy and guidelines on using the right tool).
This brings me to another issue I have with the style. Every feature is explained starting with an elementary example and then generally describing it in a more generic way. Personally, I would prefer a concise description of the feature before demonstrating it by an example - I find it easier to understand the feature this way rather then trying to decipher what it would be by going through the example first. But that might be a personal preference.
Bottom line: shortcomings notwithstanding, the book delivered what it promised and it was pretty readable at that. Unless a better choice emerges, definitely recommended as an overview of Swift.
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