Top Advanced iOS Books and Videos for Pro Developers

Once you’ve hit the level of a professional iOS developer, it’s easy to feel like you’re spending less and less time coding, and more time just trying to stay on top of the shifting sands of framework updates, library changes and don’t even talk about Apple dropping the iOS 14 GM just a day before public release!

You’re not alone! It’s hard as a professional to stay on top of everything. That’s why we have one of the largest and most up-to-date collections of advanced iOS books and video courses anywhere to help you stay at the top of your development game.

We’re making a selection of Pro-level iOS courses and books free for everyone to consume, for a few days this week. It’s our way of giving back to you, the Pro developer, who builds the apps upon which our very industry depends!

Read on to see what we’re making free for the next few days, and how you can get started with these video courses and books today!

Top Advanced iOS Video Courses

We’ve taken a look at our viewing stats, and chosen the top three most popular advanced iOS video courses from the last month to showcase for you. The breadth of these three videos is pretty typical of our collection of video courses, which boasts over 4,000+ videos on a massive range of concepts, frameworks and technologies that are critical for your success as a professional app developer.

These three Pro-level iOS development courses are free for everyone until the end of Thursday, October 29:

Combine in the raywenderlich.com App

Did you know that our official raywenderlich.com iOS app is open-source? And did you know that the app uses Combine behind the scenes to power parts of the app based on changes stored in User Defaults?

In Combine in the raywenderlich.com App, you’ll dive into the details of how we use Combine in a real-world app scenario, while you cover the following concepts in five videos:

• Passthrough Subjects: User settings for the app are stored in User Defaults. To publish changes from them, an ObservableObject, PassthroughSubjects, and AnyPublishers are employed.
• Unit Tests: GRDB, which the app uses for data storage, relies on the CombineExpectations library. SettingsManagerTestCase makes use of its Recorders as well.
• Any Cancellables: Any Cancellable (which the sink method returns) is a type-erased, Hashable class that you’ll be using a lot with Combine.
• Observable Objects: ObservableObjects make use of a publisher, named objectWillChange, which doesn’t send any data, and can’t fail.
• Published: Published is a property wrapper which automatically adds a publisher that emits new values. It can be cleaner than calling objectWillChange.

This course is recommended for intermediate to advanced iOS developers with some experience using SwiftUI and User Defaults, but not necessarily any Combine experience.

Intermediate iOS Design Patterns

Level-up your knowledge of design patterns with this course! Covers the MVVM, Factory, Adapter, Iterator, Prototype, State, Multitask Delegate, and Facade patterns.

Intermediate iOS Design Patterns covers eight modern design patterns across 22 videos in two sections:

• MVVM, Factory, Adapter, and Iterator: Dive deep into each of these patterns with a theory video for each pattern, as well as a practical usage video to exercise your skills.
• Prototype, State, Multitask Delegate and Facade: Go further with even more design patterns; again, each of these patterns has a video that talks about the theory of this design patters, and then follows up with a practical usage video to practice what you’ve learned, along with a bonus videos that demonstrate when you should use each pattern.

This course is for intermediate iOS developers with a working understanding of iOS development. New to design patterns? Check out our Fundamental iOS Design Patterns course first.

Advanced MapKit

Level up your MapKit knowledge! Learn how to customize your maps by way of custom drawing. Discover the difference between an overlay and a renderer, and how you can use those components to expand the map by providing more information, or by creating an entirely map using your own map tiles.

Advanced MapKit contains ten videos:

• Introduction: Welcome to the course! Learn about the cool ways MapKit lets you change the visual look and feel of your maps.
• Understand Overlays and Renderers: Overlays and Renderers are the key components from doing any custom drawing on the map. Let’s see how to use them.
• Draw on the Map: This episode will get you started with drawing by showing how to create shapes on your map.
• Overlay an Image: Check out how to add an image to provide detail to an empty portion of a map.
• Get Directions: Rendering directions requires two steps. First you need to request directions, which you’ll do in this episode.
• Draw Map Directions: Once you have directions, you must draw them on the map. Let’s try that out!
• Use Third Party Map Tiles: This episode covers the process of swapping out the Map Tiles with Open Street Map, while still being powered by MapKit.
• Create Custom Map Tiles: You can also substitute standard map tiles with custom ones, creating your own unique maps.
• Incorporate GeoJSON: GeoJSON allows you to add rendering information to a map from regular JSON files.
• Conclusion: You’ve learned a lot about cool MapKit effects! Check out some resources to help you learn more about MapKit and Core Location.

This course is designed for developers who have experience with iOS, Swift, and most importantly, MapKit. The viewer should also have UIKit experience. The course is meant for developers to “level up” their MapKit skills in order to fully customize the map.

Top Advanced iOS Books

You love our books, and these latest two professional iOS books that we’ve updated in the last month are no exception! These two books are among the most popular books we’ve released in the past year, and they’ve just been updated to iOS 14, Swift 5.3 and Xcode 12.

You can read these two Pro-level iOS mobile development books for free until the end of Thursday, October 29: