Introducing the iOS 12 Launch Party!
iOS 12 drops next week, and to mark the occasion, we’re launching our biggest celebration to date, with three new books and tons of updated books and courses! By Chris Belanger.
2) Push Notifications
I’m also pleased to introduce our second newest book: Push Notifications by Tutorials!
Our push notifications tutorials have been some of our most popular from year to year, so we finally agreed that it made sense to write a book!
In Push Notifications by Tutorials, 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, as sometimes you don’t need all the overhead of a remote notification, and it’s enough to simply schedule a notification to appear at a specific point in the future or when you enter a specific location.
Here’s the high-level view of what’s contained in this book:
- Getting to know push notifications: Before diving in, learn the basics of what a push notification is, what the flow is for delivering them, and what are they useful for.
- Payloads: A push notification is constructed and delivered based on a payload structure. You’ll dive deep into all of the possible customizations and options to this payload structure.
- Push notification servers: Learn about Apple Push Notification Service (APNs) — Apple’s service for delivering push notifications. What is a device token, and how do you test sending notifications from your own Mac?
- Server-side pushes: Delivery of remote push notifications is usually done by a remote server. Learn how to create your very own Vapor-based server to register device tokens and deliver notifications from your own server, as well as some of the optional third-party providers you could use.
- Handling common scenarios: Learn how to handle common scenarios relating to push notifications such as delivering notifications in the foreground, handling user interactions, silent notification, and pre-fetching content in the background when your notification is delivered to the user.
- Custom actions: Add custom actions to your notifications and learn how you can leverage these to take your notification interaction to the next level.
- Modifying the payload: Learn how to modify the push notification payload after it actually arrives at the user’s device, letting you manipulate your notifications on-device in an extremely fine-grained way.
And much more!
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.
Push Notifications by Tutorials Author
Our author on this book is long-time raywenderlich.com reader Scott Grosch, and we couldn’t be more pleased to publish his very first iOS book! Here’s a little about Scott:
Scott Grosch has been involved with iOS app development since the first release of the public SDK from Apple. He mostly works with a small set of clients on a couple large apps. During the day, Scott is a Solutions Architect at a Fortune 500 company in the Pacific Northwest. At night, he’s still working on figuring out how to be a good parent to a toddler with his wife.
Since push notifications is such a focused subject, we decided that the book needed to be direct and to-the point; so instead of making you wade 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.
And a compact book like this needs a compact price to match. Therefore we’ve priced Push Notifications by Tutorials to help you get the job done; the book will be released for the incredible launch price of just $29.99!
Push Notifications by Tutorials will be available on September 24, 2018.
3) Advanced iOS App Architecture
Finally, the third of our new books this season is one that you’ve been asking about for quite some time: architecting iOS apps!
Advanced iOS App Architecture thoroughly explains and demonstrates how to apply popular iOS app architectures, one at a time. The authors, René Cacheaux and Josh Berlin, have been speaking on architecture for several years now, and they have put all of their passion and knowledge about good iOS architecture into this book.
Now, more than ever, it’s very important to understand and apply good software architecture practices in our projects as apps are getting more complex and as development teams are pressured to deliver faster results despite constantly changing requirements.
Here’s the high-level overview of this book:
iOS architecture in theory: The first half of the book introduces you to different aspects of iOS app architecture. We recommend reading these chapters before diving into any of the specific architecture chapters to get a good handle on the concepts involved.
iOS architecture in practice: 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.
The first early access release of Advanced iOS App Architecture will be available on October 1, 2018.
Updated Books
On top of all of our new books, we’ve also been busy working to update many of our existing books for iOS 12, Swift 4.2 and Xcode 10! Here’s the updated lineup for this year:
4) Swift Apprentice, Fourth Edition
The fourth edition of our popular book, Swift Apprentice, covers programming in Swift 4.2 in a straightforward, easy-to-understand manner, through a sequence of tutorials and hands-on challenges.
This book is perfect for complete beginners to Swift or for developers who want to sharpen their Swift chops and make sure they’re using the best new features of the language.
You’ll start with the basics like constants, values and types, then move up to more complicated items such as data structures, classes and enumerators, and finish off with some advanced topics like protocol extensions, custom operators and protocol-oriented programming.
Swift Apprentice, Fourth Edition, has been fully updated for Swift 4.2 and will be released on September 17, 2018, as a free update to existing digital customers.
If you don’t have the book yet, pre-order it now! During the iOS 12 Launch Party sale, you can get the book for only $49.99.