iOS & Swift Books

Swift Apprentice: Fundamentals

This is a book for complete beginners to Apple’s modern programming language — Swift.

All the code in the book works inside of Xcode’s easy-to-use playgrounds. That means you can focus on core Swift language concepts, such as classes, protocols, and generics without getting bogged down by extraneous details.

This is a companion book to the SwiftUI Apprentice; the SwiftUI Apprentice focuses on building apps, while Swift Apprentice focuses on the Swift language itself.

App Design Apprentice

Learn Modern App Design with Figma!

This book guides you through designing modern mobile apps using fundamental design principles.

This book is for intermediate iOS and Android developers who already know the basics of mobile app development but want to also learn how to design apps with attractive and effective UI and UX.

Topics Covered in App Design Apprentice Figma: Learn the basics of this modern design tool. App Teardowns: Analyze and pick out the best parts of other well-designed apps. Wireframes: Explore what makes good app user flows. Reusable Components: Learn to create and use reusable components such as buttons and toolbars. Typography: Basics for communicating hierarchy, order and emphasis. Color: Leverage visual styles and palettes. Transitions and Animations: Create different transitions between screens to communicate relationships. Design Systems: Implement best practices for creating good app experiences in each ecosystem.

This book will leave you with the knowledge needed to design modern mobile apps that are functional and attractive.

Git Apprentice

Learn Git!

Chances are if you’re involved with software development you’ve heard of and have used Git at some point in your life. Version control systems are critical for any successful collaborative software project. Git is both simple to start using and accommodating for the most complex tasks with version control. Even seasoned Git users hit roadblocks on how to handle common situations.

Git Apprentice is here to help! This book is the easiest and fastest way to get hands-on experience with using Git for version control of your projects.

Who This Book Is For

This book is for anyone who would like to leverage the power of version control with Git in their software development process. The book starts with a gentle introduction to Git. It then moves on to walk you through creating a new repository, cloning an existing one, merging in changes, and all of the bits in between.

Topics Covered in Git Apprentice A Crash Course in Git: Learn how to get started with Git, the differences between platforms, and a quick overview of the typical Git workflow. Cloning a Repo: Discover how to clone a remote repo to your local machine, and what constitutes “forking” a repository. Git Log & History: You’ll discover the versatility of the git log command—displaying branches, graphs and even filtering the history. Creating a Repository: If you are starting a new project, and want to use Git for source control, you first need to create a new repository. And more!

One thing you can count on: after reading this book, you’ll be well-prepared to use Git in your own software development workflow!

SwiftUI Cookbook

The SwiftUI Cookbook is a reference for common patterns for creating user interfaces in SwiftUI that you can quickly refer to while coding.

Swift Cookbook

The Swift Cookbook is a collection of common Swift language idioms and best practices that you can quickly refer to while coding.

Living by the Code

Living by the Code brings the experiences and insights of over 40 of today’s top developers, leaders and innovators in tech together in one single book, to help you grow your career in today’s ever-changing technical landscape. It’s like having dozens of tech’s best mentors — right at your fingertips.

Concurrency by Tutorials

Dive Into Concurrency in Your iOS Apps!

What is concurrency, and why would you even want to use it in your apps? Find out everything you need to know in this book. Learn about Grand Central Dispatch, Apple’s implementation of C’s libdispatch, also known as GCD — one of the simplest ways to queue up tasks to run in parallel. Then, take on Operations & Operation Queues for when GCD doesn’t quite cut it; you’ll learn how to further customize and reuse your concurrent work. You’ll then learn common concurrency problems that you could face while developing concurrent applications, such as Race Conditions, Deadlocks, and more. Finally, understand threads and Thread Sanitizer and the various threading-related concepts and how these connect to the knowledge you’ve accumulated throughout this book. You’ll also learn how to use Thread Sanitizer to ease your debugging when things go wrong.

Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering

Learn the powerful secrets of Apple’s software debugger, LLDB!

In Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering, you’ll come to realize debugging is an enjoyable process to help you better understand software. Not only will you learn to find bugs faster, but you’ll also learn how other developers have solved problems similar to yours.

You’ll also learn how to create custom, powerful debugging scripts that will help you quickly find the secrets behind any bit of code that piques your interest.

After reading this book, you’ll have the tools and knowledge to answer even the most obscure question about your code — or someone else’s.

This book is for intermediate-to-advanced iOS/macOS developers who are already familiar with either Swift or Objective-C and want to take their debugging skills to the next level.

SwiftUI by Tutorials

Build fluid and engaging declarative UI for your apps — using less code — with SwiftUI!

SwiftUI by Tutorials is designed to help you learn how to transition from the “old way” of building your app UI with UIKit, to the “new way” of building responsive UI with modern declarative syntax with SwiftUI. This book is for readers who are comfortable building Swift apps, and want to make the exciting leap into building their app UI with modern, declarative code.

What is SwiftUI?

SwiftUI lets you build better apps, faster, and with less code. It’s a developer’s dream come true! With SwiftUI, you can design your user interfaces in a declarative way; instead of developing app interfaces in an imperative way, by coding all of the application state logic before time, you can instead define what your app’s UI should do in a particular state and let the underlying OS figure out how to do it. What’s more is that SwiftUI lets you build modern, responsive UI and animations for all Apple devices — not just iOS. So whether you’re building apps for iOS, watchOS, tvOS or any other Apple platform, you can use the same concise, natural language to describe your UI and have it look stunning — no matter where your code runs. In addition, SwiftUI’s built-in automatic support for things such as dark mode, localization and accessibility, along with Xcode 11 support for drag-and-drop design and instant preview makes it easier to build apps than ever before.

How is this book different than SwiftUI Apprentice?

Our other book on getting started with SwiftUI, SwiftUI Apprentice, is designed to teach new developers how to build iOS apps, using a SwiftUI-first approach. The goal of that book is to teach you fundamental development practices as you build out some fully-functional and great-looking apps! This book, SwiftUI by Tutorials, is designed for developers who have a solid background in iOS development, and are looking to make the leap from building apps with UIKit, to building apps with SwiftUI.

SwiftUI Animations by Tutorials

Drive SwiftUI into Motion using Animations!

SwiftUI has absolutely changed our lives when it comes to developer experience and developer productivity. We can make beautiful apps extremely quickly, get instant feedback from SwiftUI previews, and iterate. SwiftUI also enables developers to easily leverage most common animations using simple SwiftUI modifiers, which makes it a pleasure to use. But it also begs the question: “How do I make my app stand out if everyone is using the same standard animations?”

Luckily, SwiftUI Animations by Tutorials is here to help you learn how to create detailed and delightful animations, starting from the basics and up to the most complex and customizable ones.

Push Notifications by Tutorials

Get Started with Push Notifications on iOS!

Push notifications may seem simple and straightforward at first since almost everyone is familiar with them; however, knowing how and when to use them in practice can prove challenging.

With advancements in the latest iOS releases bringing advanced features, such as rich media notifications, notification actions, grouped notifications and more, you will quickly realize that you need a book to help you out. Well, here’s that book!

You’ll learn everything you need in order to create, send and receive push notifications, meaning notifications that come from an external service, as opposed to locally from the device. You’ll also cover how to handle local notifications because, sometimes you don’t need all the overhead of a remote notification; rather, it’s enough to simply schedule a notification to appear at a specific point in the future or when you enter a specific location.

Since push notifications is such a focused subject, this book is direct and to-the point; instead of wading through 300 pages of theory before getting down to business, the book gets the job done in just over 150 pages. It’s just the information you need, just when you need it.

By the end of this book, you’ll be a master of push notifications and well on your way to implementing them inside your own apps!

Catalyst by Tutorials

Run iOS apps Natively on macOS With Catalyst!

Catalyst by Tutorials shows you how to take all of those great apps you’ve built on iOS and run them right on macOS. But like everything else with Apple, it’s not always as straightforward as you’d like it to be. This book will show you how to design your apps to work well on macOS, what you can and can’t port between the two platforms, and any other “gotchas” to keep an eye out for when building apps under Catalyst.

This book is for developers who have a good handle on building iOS apps and want to learn how to port those apps to run on macOS as well.

What is Catalyst?

Formerly known as Marzipan to Apple insiders, Catalyst lets you extend your iPad apps to macOS. Under Catalina and Xcode 11, developers can start building their iPad apps with macOS as a target.

And we’re not just talking about grossly super-sized versions of iPad apps on your Mac; Catalyst apps will support native macOS controls and functionality, such as the familiar menu bar, support for mouse and keyboards, window resizing, proper scroll bars, Touch Bar support, and desktop-based drag and drop.

So if you’ve been hesitating to port your iPad apps to macOS because you just don’t want to have to learn to develop for the desktop, then now is your time to start!

Real-World iOS by Tutorials

This book will be your guide to turn ideas into robust applications that can scale.

This book is for iOS developers with a basic understanding of Swift, SwiftUI and Core Data, that want to learn how to create apps that follow the best standards.

Level up your skills by learning about:

App architecture: Discover how to organize your code using MVVM and feature grouping. Building features: Learn how to structure your code to work on features that can be testable. Create code that scale: Understand the principles to create code that’s robust using S.O.L.I.D. principles. Async/await: Learn how the new modern concurrency model can help you write well-structured asynchronous code. Accessibility and good-looking apps: Discover how you can create apps that look and feel good for all audiences. Modularization: Learn how to create modular code that can be reused. Privacy: Understand why privacy is important and the tools Apple provides so you can develop apps that respect users’ data.

After completing this book, you’ll be prepared to tackle any new or existing project and create code that’s testable and robust.

macOS by Tutorials

macOS by Tutorials is a series of epic-length tutorials where you’ll learn to build four complete native macOS apps! Each app explores a different style of interface and takes you step-by-step from start to finish. By the end of the book, you’ll be experienced enough to turn your ideas into real apps you can sell! You also get full source code, image files, and other resources you can re-use for your own projects.

This book for developers with some experience developing for iOS using Swift and SwiftUI.

iOS Animations by Tutorials

Make Delightful Animations with Swift!

This book is for iOS developers who already know the basics of iOS and Swift, and want to dive deep into animations.

Start with basic view animations and move all the way to layer animations, animating constraints, view controller transitions, and more!

Apple Augmented Reality by Tutorials

Learn Augmented Reality for the Apple Platform!

This book is the easiest and fastest way to get hands-on experience using Apple frameworks and technologies like Reality Composer, RealityKit, and ARKit — all the available rendering technologies Apple has to offer, as well as a collection of fun projects for creating various real-world AR experiences.

After reading this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of the technologies and frameworks used to create powerful, immersive AR experiences for the Apple platform.

Take a deep dive into:

AR Quick Look: Discover how to integrate AR Quick Look into your apps to give them some cool AR superpowers. Reality Composer & Reality Files: Find out how to leverage the power of Reality Composer to create interactive AR-based experiences. Reality Converter & PBR Materials: Discover how PBR materials can add a level of realism to your AR objects, and how you can use Reality Converter to convert, view and customize USDZ content. RealityKit: Find out how to set up and use RealityKit to build a face-based augmented reality app. Facial Blend Shapes: Build a fully interactive augmented reality face mask that reacts to your facial expressions using blend shapes. ARKit: Get a complete introduction to ARKit, Apple’s framework for creating fully interactive augmented reality, and learn about the different types of rendering options available with ARKit. Raycasting & Physics: Learn about raycasting, 2D hit-testing and the SpriteKit physics engine as you add more features and functionality to your game. ECS & Collaborative Experiences: Build a collaborative AR experience and learn how to create and manage a multipeer connection.

Advanced iOS App Architecture

Implement Modern Clean Architectures in Your iOS Apps!

Apps are becoming more complex, and development teams are being pressured to deliver faster results in the face of constantly changing requirements. Now, more than ever, you need to understand and apply good software architecture practices in your projects.

Advanced iOS App Architecture thoroughly explains multiple modern iOS architectures, and demonstrates their usage in real-world apps.

The first half of the book introduces you to different aspects of iOS app architectures. We recommend reading these chapters before diving into any of the specific architecture chapters to get a good handle on the concepts involved.

The second half of the book explores multiple architectures, one per chapter. Each architecture chapter begins with a little history, followed by a detailed theory walkthrough. The remainder of each architecture chapter focuses on applying the theory to iOS app development.

Each architecture chapter concludes by covering the pros and cons of that architecture. You can read this section in order — or jump straight to the architecture that interests you. It’s your choice!

This book is for iOS developers who build apps using Swift. The material in this book assumes familiarity with design patterns and with basic architectures — such as MVC — and basic architecture concepts, such as inversion of control.

iOS Test-Driven Development by Tutorials

Learn How to Test iOS Applications!

This book is for intermediate iOS developers who already know the basics of iOS and Swift development but want to learn how to write code which is both testable and maintainable.

To start, you’ll learn the TDD Cycle and how to implement these concepts within an iOS application. The book then takes you through Test Expressions and Expectation so that you can test synchronous code. You’ll then write tests to verify networking endpoints and the ability to mock the returned results, followed by writing tests that run against authentication endpoints. Continue trouble-shooting your apps by understanding common legacy problems, as well as breaking dependencies into modules. And, finally, refactor large classes into smaller, more manageable classes and objects.

Advanced Git

Master Git!

Chances are if you’re involved with software development you’ve heard of and have used Git at some point in your life. Version control systems are critical for any successful collaborative software project. Git is both simple to start using and accommodating for the most complex tasks with version control. Even seasoned Git users hit roadblocks on how to handle common situations.

Advanced Git is here to help! This book is the easiest and fastest way to get hands-on experience with using Git for version control of your projects.

Take a deep dive into:

How Git actually works: After using Git for a while it’s good to discover the whys behind all of the things. Rebasing: Rebasing and squashing doesn’t have to be scary; it’s quite a useful and advanced way of merging code to support your collaborative workflow. Undoing what you’ve done: Most frustration with Git comes from not being able to undo something that you’ve screwed up. But Git has lots of ways you can go back and recover from a weird merge or commit state. Workflows in Git: Working with Git requires some rules to make sure things go smoothly across development teams. Learn the most common workflows and how to decide which one to use. And more!

One thing you can count on: after reading this book, you’ll be well-prepared to use Git in your own software development workflow!

Data Structures & Algorithms in Swift

Understanding how data structures and algorithms work in code is crucial for creating efficient and scalable apps and acing job interviews. Swift’s standard library and, more recently, the Swift Collections and Algorithms packages contain a robust set of general-purpose collection types and algorithms, yet they don’t cover every case!

In Data Structures and Algorithms in Swift, you’ll learn how to implement the most popular and useful data structures and when and why you should use one particular data structure or algorithm over another. This set of basic data structures and algorithms will serve as an excellent foundation for building more complex and special-purpose constructs. The high-level expressiveness of Swift makes it an ideal choice for learning these core concepts without sacrificing performance.

You’ll start with the fundamental structures of linked lists, queues and stacks, and see how to implement them in a highly Swift-like way. Move on to working with various types of trees, including general purpose trees, binary trees, AVL trees, binary search trees, and tries. Go beyond bubble and insertion sort with better-performing algorithms, including mergesort, radix sort, heap sort, and quicksort. Learn how to construct directed, non-directed and weighted graphs to represent many real-world models. Traverse those graphs and trees efficiently with breadth-first, depth-first, Dijkstra’s and Prim’s algorithms to solve problems such as finding the shortest path or lowest cost in a network.

By the end of this book, you’ll have hands-on experience solving common issues with data structures and algorithms — and you’ll be well on your way to developing your own efficient and useful implementations!

Expert Swift

Master the Swift language with the Expert Swift book!

Swift is a rich language with a plethora of features to offer. Reading the official documentation or entry-level books is important, but it’s not enough to grasp the true power of the language.

Expert Swift is here to help, by showing you how to harness the full power of Swift. You’ll learn about advanced usages of protocols, generics, functional reactive programming, API design and more.

iOS App Distribution & Best Practices

Learn how to sign up for Apple Developer Program, generate the various certificates needed, configure your app and submit an app to the App Store for approval, both manually and through automated processes through automated pipelines. You’ll learn how to use Apple TestFlight to add internal and external testers and receive feedback and crash reports.

iOS App Distribution starts with explaining hurdles everyone faces, such as code signing, provisioning profiles, and how to do manual releases. It’ll then go into more advanced topics, including distribution through TestFlight, build customization, automation, and continuous integration.

Server-Side Swift with Vapor

Learn how to build web apps and web APIs using Swift and the Vapor 4 framework!

If you’re a beginner to web development, but have worked with Swift for some time, you’ll find it’s easy to create robust, fully featured web apps and web APIs with Vapor 4.

Whether you’re looking to create a backend for your iOS app, or want to create fully-featured web apps, Vapor is the perfect platform for you.

This book starts with the basics of web development and introduces the basics of Vapor; it then walks you through creating APIs and web backends; creating and configuring databases; deploying to Heroku, AWS, or Docker; testing your creations and more!

Core Data by Tutorials

Learn Core Data with Swift!

This book is for intermediate iOS developers who already know the basics of iOS and Swift development but want to learn how to use Core Data to save data in their apps.

Start with with the basics like setting up your own Core Data Stack all the way to advanced topics like migration, performance, multithreading, and more!

RxSwift: Reactive Programming with Swift

Leverage the power of RxSwift in your reactive apps!

This book is for iOS developers who already feel comfortable with iOS and Swift, and want to dive deep into development with RxSwift.

Start with an introduction to the reactive programming paradigm; learn about observers and observables, filtering and transforming operators, and how to work with the UI, and finish off by building a fully-featured app in RxSwift.

Machine Learning by Tutorials

Get started with Machine Learning for Apple and iOS!

Want to know a secret? Machine learning isn’t really that hard to learn. The truth is, you don’t need a PhD from a prestigious university or a background in mathematics to do machine learning. If you already know how to code, you can pick up machine learning quite easily — promise!

This book will get you started with machine learning on iOS and Apple devices. The first bit is a gentle introduction to the world of machine learning and what it has to offer — as well as what its limitations are. In the rest of the book, you’ll look at each of these topics in more detail, until you know enough to make machine learning a useful tool in your software development toolbox.

There are now several high-level Apple frameworks, including Natural Language, Speech, and Vision, that provide advanced machine learning functionality behind simple APIs as part of Apple’s iOS tooling. Whether you want to convert speech to text, recognize language or grammatical structure, detect faces in photos or track moving objects in video, these frameworks have got you covered.

In this book, you’ll learn how to use these tools and frameworks to make your apps smarter. Even better, you’ll learn how machine learning works behind the scenes — and why this technology is awesome.

This book is for all Apple and iOS developers who are interested in learning how to train models, code image recognition systems, learn how natural language processing works, build sequence classifiers and more.

Auto Layout by Tutorials

This book will be your guide as you explore and master the many capabilities of Auto Layout.

This book is for iOS developers of all skill levels, from those just getting started building user interfaces to the experienced hands who want to get more from Auto Layout.

Take a deep dive into:

Interface Builder: Learn to use Interface Builder to construct and maintain your user interfaces. Stack Views and Scroll Views: Learn how these special view types interact with Auto Layout and how best to utilize them in your apps. Self-Sizing Views: Discover how to make your user interface dynamically adapt to its content. Animating Constraints: See how to animate your Auto Layout constraints to provide feedback, focus user attention and improve navigation. Adaptive Layout: Learn to use Auto Layout to make adjustments for screen size, orientation, Dynamic Type size and more. Resolving Common Issues: Discover how to investigate when things go awry and learn how to resolve Auto Layout conflicts.

After completing this book, you’ll be prepared to harness the full power of Auto Layout in all of your apps.

Design Patterns by Tutorials

Learn design patterns with Swift!

Design patterns are incredibly useful, no matter what language or platform you develop for. Using the right pattern for the right job can save you time, create less maintenance work for your team and ultimately let you create more great things with less effort. Every developer should absolutely know about design patterns, and how and when to apply them. That’s what you’re going to learn in this book!

Move from the basic building blocks of patterns such as MVC, Delegate and Strategy, into more advanced patterns such as the Factory, Prototype and Multicast Delegate pattern, and finish off with some less-common but still incredibly useful patterns including Flyweight, Command and Chain of Responsibility.

And not only does Design Patterns by Tutorials cover each pattern in theory, but you’ll also work to incorporate each pattern in a real-world app that’s included with each chapter. Learn by doing, in the step-by-step fashion you’ve come to expect in the other books in our by Tutorials series.