Flutter Apprentice

Build for both iOS and Android with Flutter!

Flutter is a new and exciting software development toolkit that lets you target multiple platforms at once, so you can build apps for iOS, Android and even web and desktop, all from a single codebase.

Similar to modern web technologies, Flutter uses a declarative approach to UI development. You can take advantage of “hot reload” of new code while developing, and your apps will perform at native speed thanks to Flutter’s custom rendering engine.

It’s been the dream of mobile developers for years to find a cross-platform tool that lets you build for both iOS and Android without having to write and maintain two separate codebases. With Flutter and Flutter Apprentice, you can achieve that dream!

Android Fundamentals by Tutorials

In this book, you’ll learn how to build Android applications from scratch using Android Studio as the IDE. You’ll learn the basics of Kotlin and how to build elegant UI with Jetpack Compose. You’ll expand on the basics by making robust and scalable apps using well-established architecture patterns.

Metal by Tutorials

Build your own low-level game engine in Metal!

Metal is a unified application programming interface (API) for the graphics processing unit, or GPU. It’s unified because it applies to both 3D graphics and data-parallel computation paradigms. Metal is a low-level API because it provides programmers near-direct access to the GPU. Finally, Metal is a low-overhead API because it reduces the central processing unit (CPU) cost by multi-threading and pre-compiling of resources.

But beyond the technical definition, Metal is the most appropriate way to use the GPU’s parallel processing power to visualize data or solve numerical challenges. It’s also tailored to be used for machine learning, image/video processing or, as this book describes, graphics rendering.

This book will introduce you to low-level graphics programming in Metal — Apple’s framework for programming on the graphics processing unit (GPU). As you progress through this book, you’ll learn many of the fundamentals that go into making a game engine and gradually put together your own engine. Once your game engine is complete, you’ll be able to put together 3D scenes and program your own simple 3D games. Because you’ll have built your 3D game engine from scratch, you’ll be able to customize every aspect of what you see on your screen.

This book is for intermediate Swift developers interested in learning 3D graphics or gaining a deeper understanding of how game engines work.

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.

Combine: Asynchronous Programming With Swift

Learn all about declarative asynchronous programming with Swift using the Combine framework!

Writing asynchronous code can be challenging, with a variety of possible interfaces to represent, perform, and consume asynchronous work — delegates, notification center, KVO, closures, etc. Juggling all of these different mechanisms can be somewhat overwhelming. Does it really have to be this hard? Not anymore!

With Apple’s introduction of the Combine framework in WWDC 2019, declarative and reactive programming in Swift have become a meaningful aspect of the language and a game-changer in how developers perform and compose pieces of asynchronous work, making it a must-have tool at your disposal.

The introduction of Combine as a built-in framework in Apple’s ecosystem is promising news to developers who were interested in frameworks such as RxSwift or ReactiveSwift, but didn’t want the overhead of a third-party dependency. And while experience with either of the above is useful, it’s not a prerequisite for this book. You’ll learn everything from the ground up to become a true Combine master.

Combine is Apple’s framework to work with asynchronous events in a unified and reactive way that ensures your app is always up to date based on the latest state of its data.

What are these asynchronous events, you might ask? Anything that happens over time in your application can be represented by what is known as a Combine Publisher — network requests, user input, notifications, KVO, and much more. And since Combine unifies all of these different mechanisms under a single interface, this opens the door to interesting and powerful ways of composing logic and work in a declarative and universal way.

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.

Data Structures & Algorithms in Dart

Perhaps you’ve heard about Big O notation, stacks and queues, or bubble sort and quicksort. You’d like to learn more, but it’s hard to find any good examples and explanations that use your favorite programming language, Dart.

Data Structures & Algorithms in Dart is here to help with in-depth explanations, copious illustrations, and step-by-step examples. The book begins by reviewing fundamental data structures like lists and maps and then goes on to teach you how to build other important structures from scratch, including stacks, linked lists, queues, trees and graphs. From there you’ll use these data structures to understand and write many different traversal, searching and sorting algorithms. All along the way, you’ll learn how to analyze the efficiency of your code and express that efficiency using Big O notation.

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.

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.

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.

Swift Apprentice: Beyond the Basics

Swift Apprentice: Beyond the Basics is the sequel to Swift Apprentice: Fundamentals and explores additional Swift programming concepts. These topics include such things as access control, code organization, testing, property wrappers, result builders, concurrency, value semantics, and memory management, presenting them using interactive playgrounds that the reader can follow along with.

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:

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.

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:

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!

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!