iOS & Swift Books

macOS Apprentice

macOS Apprentice is a series of multi-chapter tutorials where you’ll learn about developing native macOS apps in Swift, using both SwiftUI — Apple’s newest user interface technology — and AppKit — the venerable UI framework. Along the way, you’ll learn several ways to execute Swift code and you’ll build two fully featured apps from scratch.

If you’re new to macOS and Swift, or to programming in general, learning how to write an app can seem incredibly overwhelming.

That’s why you need a guide that:

Shows you how to write an app step-by-step. Uses tons of illustrations and screenshots to make everything clear. Guides you in a fun and easy-going manner.

You’ll start at the very beginning. The first section assumes you have little to no knowledge of programming in Swift. It walks you through installing Xcode and then teaches you the basics of the Swift programming language. Along the way, you’ll explore several different ways to run Swift code, taking advantage of the fact that you’re developing natively on macOS.

macOS Apprentice doesn’t cover every single feature of macOS; it focuses on the absolutely essential ones. Instead of just covering a list of features, macOS Apprentice does something much more important: It explains how all the building blocks fit together and what is involved in building real apps. You’re not going to create quick example programs that demonstrate how to accomplish a single feature. Instead, you’ll develop complete, fully-formed apps, while exploring many of the complexities and joys of programming macOS.

How is this book different than macOS by Tutorials?

Our other book on building apps for macOS, macOS by Tutorials, is designed for developers who have a solid background in iOS development and are looking to make the leap to developing native macOS apps.

This book, macOS Apprentice, is designed to teach new developers how to build macOS apps while assuming they have little to no experience with Swift or any other part of the Apple development ecosystem.

SwiftUI Apprentice

SwiftUI Apprentice is a series of epic-length tutorials where you’ll learn to build three complete apps from scratch, using Apple’s new user interface technology: SwiftUI! Each app is more advanced than the one before, and together, they cover everything to make your own apps using SwiftUI. By the end of the book, you’ll be experienced enough to turn your ideas into real apps you can sell on the App Store. These tutorials have easy to follow step-by-step instructions and consist of more than pages and illustrations! You also get full source code, image files, and other resources you can re-use for your own projects.

If you’re new to iOS and Swift, or to programming in general, learning how to write an app can seem incredibly overwhelming. That’s why you need a guide that:

Shows you how to write an app step-by-step. Uses tons of illustrations and screenshots to make everything clear. Guides you in a fun and easy-going manner.

You’ll start at the very beginning. The first section assumes you have little to no knowledge of programming in Swift for iOS but still shows you how to build an entire fitness app from scratch using SwiftUI. SwiftUI Apprentice doesn’t cover every single feature of iOS; it focuses on the absolutely essential ones. Instead of just covering a list of features, SwiftUI Apprentice does something much more important: It explains how all the building blocks fit together and what is involved in building real apps. You’re not going to create quick example programs that demonstrate how to accomplish a single feature. Instead, you’ll develop complete, fully-formed apps, with beautiful, professionally-designed user interfaces, that are good enough to submit to the App Store!

How is this book different than SwiftUI by Tutorials?

Our other book on building apps with SwiftUI, 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.

This book, SwiftUI Apprentice, is designed to teach new developers how to build iOS apps, using a SwiftUI-first approach. Its goal is to teach you fundamental development practices as you build out some fully-functional and great-looking apps!

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!

Kotlin Multiplatform by Tutorials

The best book to teach you how to share code across platforms using Kotlin Multiplatform. You’ll gain the foundation of creating user interfaces using native UI toolkits and then writing common code for serialization, networking and persistence. You’ll also learn how dependency injection, testing and different architectures fit in with Kotlin Multiplatform so that you build maintainable and scalable apps for the real world.

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.

watchOS With SwiftUI by Tutorials

Build amazing apps with SwiftUI for Apple Watch

The Apple Watch is, by far, the most common smart watch in the market. Its sales have even surpased those of its analog competitors. With this book you will learn how to develop native watchOS applications for this popular device. And at the same time, to do so, you will be using one of the newest and most moderns UI frameworks developed by Apple, SwiftUI.

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!

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 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.

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!

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.