Introducing the iOS 12 Launch Party!

iOS 12 drops next week! The countdown is over, so it’s time to lift off and rocket to new heights with the raywenderlich.com iOS 12 Launch Party!

This year marks our eighth annual iOS release celebration. It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this so many years in a row now — and even harder to believe how far iOS has come from its humble beginnings!

Just think — back when many of us first started, there was no ARC, no Storyboards, no ARKit, and most importantly: no Swift!

Fast-forward to 2018, and two-billion iOS devices later, we have a new, massive iPhone XS Max, Neural Engines inside phones for near-real time machine learning, and an Apple Watch that’s got your back if you’ve fallen and, er, can’t get up 👀

This year, we have an amazing lineup of iOS 12 tutorials, books, and courses — and over $9,000 worth of of giveaways to be awarded to some lucky readers.

Here’s a quick overview of what’s in store:

• New and Updated Books
• New and Updated Courses
• The iOS 12 Launch Party Giveaway

New and Updated Books

This year, we have twelve books that are either new or updated for iOS 12. That number worked out well, didn’t it? And to celebrate, we’re putting all iOS 12 books on sale!

And as always, any updates to existing books are free for existing digital edition customers, to thank you for supporting our site.

Here’s the list of books we’re releasing this year and when you can expect them:

1. Machine Learning by Tutorials (NEW!) — September 13
2. Swift Apprentice, Fourth Edition — September 17
3. Core Data by Tutorials, Fifth Edition — September 19
4. Push Notifications by Tutorials (NEW!) — September 24
5. iOS Apprentice, Seventh Edition — September 26
6. Advanced iOS App Architecture (NEW!) — October 1
7. Data Structures & Algorithms, Second Edition — October 3
8. Metal by Tutorials, First Edition — October 8
9. iOS Animations by Tutorials, Fifth Edition — October 10
10. ARKit by Tutorials, Second Edition — October 15
11. Design Patterns by Tutorials, Second Edition — October 22
12. Advanced Apple Debugging & Reverse Engineering, Third Edition — October 29

Here’s a detailed look at what’s coming over the weeks to come.

Introducing Our New Books!

We have not one, not two, but three exciting new books for you this season: Machine Learning by Tutorials, Push Notifications by Tutorials, and Advanced iOS App Architecture! We think you’ll really enjoy what we have planned for these books. Read on below to see what’s in store for you!

1) Machine Learning by Tutorials

First up, I’d like to introduce our first new book: Machine Learning by Tutorials!

With every new version of iOS, Apple has made it easier to add machine learning to your apps. There are now several high-level frameworks, including Natural Language, Speech, and Vision, that provide advanced machine-learning functionality behind simple APIs as part of Apple’s iOS tooling.

Want to convert speech to text or text to speech? Want to recognize language or grammatical structure? Want to detect faces in photos or track moving objects in video? These built-in 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.

Here are the highlights of what’s inside:

• Machine learning: iOS & You: Before getting your hands dirty, you’ll look at machine learning from 10,000 feet. You’ll learn what you can do with machine learning, what concepts such as deep learning mean, and what machine learning means for mobile devices.
• Image classification: Jump into machine learning by classifying healthy snacks from unhealthy ones, learning learn how to add models to a project and how you can use Core ML for classifying images from your device. You’ll also learn how to perform localization, object detection and segmentation on images.
• Python & Turi Create: Learn how to set up a Python environment to use the tools of the trade when it comes to creating machine-learning models. You’ll learn how to use Jupyter notebooks and Turi Create to tune and export models for Core ML. You’ll also learn how to use transfer learning to train your model, and how further tuning of parameters and increasing the number of iterations can affect your model.
• Training with Keras: You’ve seen Create ML and you’ve seen Turi Create, now get ready to meet to Keras. You’ll see how to create your model from scratch using some of the lowest-level APIs available.
• Sequence classification: Machine learning isn’t limited to just images. You’ll learn how you can take motion events from your device and use machine learning to identify the activity being performed. You’ll also learn how you can use recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to predict the outcome of some event, given a sequence of events.
• Language classification & transforms: NLP classification has been popularized as a tool that can help categorize large bodies of text, such as identifying spam in your email or identifying related content from websites. You’ll deep dive into training a model for use in a fun NLP classification project. And if you can classify text using NLP classification, you can surely convert text as well, right? You’ll learn the answer to that question by working on an example of how to translate between two languages.

Machine learning has been around for a while — but that doesn’t mean you’ve missed the boat. Thanks to the internet and smartphones, there is now more data than ever to feed machine learning, and ever-cheaper computing power to power that learning. Machine learning is now a practical tool for solving real-world problems that were too complex to deal with before.

What is new, and why we’ve written this book, is that mobile devices are now powerful enough to run machine-learning algorithms right in the palm of your hand!

Machine Learning by Tutorials Authors

Here are the hard-working authors who have contributed to Machine Learning by Tutorials:

Matthijs Hollemans is an author on this book. After many years of handcrafting his logic with if-then-else statements, Matthijs finally saw the light and switched to machine learning, teaching computers to come up with those if-then-else statements by themselves. Why write programs when computers can write their own? Matthijs also lifts heavy things in the gym and plays heavy things on his guitar. Matthijs blogs about iOS machine learning at http://machinethink.net. You can find him on Twitter as @mhollemans.

Audrey Tam is also an author of this book. As a retired computer science academic, she’s a technology generalist with expertise in translating new knowledge into learning materials. Audrey has a PhD in applied math, so is especially good at dis-intimidating machine learning math. Audrey now teaches short courses in iOS app development to non-programmers, and attends nearly all Melbourne Cocoaheads monthly meetings. She also enjoys long train journeys, knitting and trekking in the Aussie wilderness.

Chris LaPollo is an author of this book. He’s told software what to do for over two decades, but lately he tells software to go figure it out itself. An independent developer and consultant focused on machine learning, he also writes video games for fun. Nowadays he spends free time with family and learning to cook. He’s kept his basil plants alive for several months — it’s a pretty big deal. Find him on Twitter at @ChrisLaPollo.

Machine Learning by Tutorials is available today for pre-order for the special launch price of $44.99 during the iOS 12 Launch Party sale! But don’t wait, since the sale ends soon.

If you want to get started in the intriguing and expanding field of machine learning, there’s no better time to do it than now!