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!

Data Structures & Algorithms in Swift

Understanding how data structures and algorithms work in code is crucial for creating efficient and scalable apps and acing job interviews. Swift’s standard library and, more recently, the Swift Collections and Algorithms packages contain a robust set of general-purpose collection types and algorithms, yet they don’t cover every case!

In Data Structures and Algorithms in Swift, you’ll learn how to implement the most popular and useful data structures and when and why you should use one particular data structure or algorithm over another. This set of basic data structures and algorithms will serve as an excellent foundation for building more complex and special-purpose constructs. The high-level expressiveness of Swift makes it an ideal choice for learning these core concepts without sacrificing performance.

You’ll start with the fundamental structures of linked lists, queues and stacks, and see how to implement them in a highly Swift-like way. Move on to working with various types of trees, including general purpose trees, binary trees, AVL trees, binary search trees, and tries. Go beyond bubble and insertion sort with better-performing algorithms, including mergesort, radix sort, heap sort, and quicksort. Learn how to construct directed, non-directed and weighted graphs to represent many real-world models. Traverse those graphs and trees efficiently with breadth-first, depth-first, Dijkstra’s and Prim’s algorithms to solve problems such as finding the shortest path or lowest cost in a network.

By the end of this book, you’ll have hands-on experience solving common issues with data structures and algorithms — and you’ll be well on your way to developing your own efficient and useful implementations!

UIKit Apprentice

For Complete Beginners!

If you’re completely new to Swift and iOS development (or need a brush-up), this is the series for you. The UIKit Apprentice is a series of epic-length tutorials for beginners where you’ll learn how to build four complete apps from scratch. Each new app will be a little more advanced than the one before, and together they cover everything you need to know to make your own apps. By the end of the series you’ll be experienced enough to turn your ideas into real apps that you can sell on the App Store. These tutorials have easy to follow step-by-step instructions, and consist of more than 1,100 pages and 500 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 With tons of illustrations and screenshots to make everything clear In a fun and easygoing manner! We’ll start at the very beginning. The first tutorial assumes absolutely zero programming knowledge but still shows you how to build an entire game from scratch. The UIKit Apprentice series doesn’t cover every single feature of iOS – it just focuses on the absolutely essential ones that you need to know. Instead of just covering a list of features, the UIKit Apprentice series does something much more important: it explains how all the different 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 that are good enough to submit to the App Store!

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.

What Is Combine?

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.

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.

What is SwiftUI?

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.

How is this book different than SwiftUI Apprentice?

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.

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.

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.

Modern Concurrency in Swift

Master Swift’s modern concurrency model!

For years, writing powerful and safe concurrent apps with Swift could easily turn into a daunting task, full of race conditions and unexplained crashes hidden in a massive nesting of callback closures.

In Swift 5.5, Apple introduced a new concurrency model featuring the async/await syntax, to let you write asynchronous code that reads like synchronous code. But like any new feature, here be dragons! So how will you achieve the much-desired mastery of Modern Swift Concurrency?

Modern Concurrency in Swift is here for the rescue, showcasing everything you need to know about async/await, tasks, actors, and everything in between!

SwiftUI Animations by Tutorials

Drive SwiftUI into Motion using Animations!

SwiftUI has absolutely changed our lives when it comes to developer experience and developer productivity. We can make beautiful apps extremely quickly, get instant feedback from SwiftUI previews, and iterate. SwiftUI also enables developers to easily leverage most common animations using simple SwiftUI modifiers, which makes it a pleasure to use. But it also begs the question: “How do I make my app stand out if everyone is using the same standard animations?”

Luckily, SwiftUI Animations by Tutorials is here to help you learn how to create detailed and delightful animations, starting from the basics and up to the most complex and customizable ones.

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!

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.

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!

Real-World iOS by Tutorials

This book will be your guide to turn ideas into robust applications that can scale.

This book is for iOS developers with a basic understanding of Swift, SwiftUI and Core Data, that want to learn how to create apps that follow the best standards.

Level up your skills by learning about:

App architecture: Discover how to organize your code using MVVM and feature grouping. Building features: Learn how to structure your code to work on features that can be testable. Create code that scale: Understand the principles to create code that’s robust using S.O.L.I.D. principles. Async/await: Learn how the new modern concurrency model can help you write well-structured asynchronous code. Accessibility and good-looking apps: Discover how you can create apps that look and feel good for all audiences. Modularization: Learn how to create modular code that can be reused. Privacy: Understand why privacy is important and the tools Apple provides so you can develop apps that respect users’ data.

After completing this book, you’ll be prepared to tackle any new or existing project and create code that’s testable and robust.

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 Animations by Tutorials

Make Delightful Animations with Swift!

This book is for iOS developers who already know the basics of iOS and Swift, and want to dive deep into animations.

Start with basic view animations and move all the way to layer animations, animating constraints, view controller transitions, and more!

Apple Augmented Reality by Tutorials

Learn Augmented Reality for the Apple Platform!

This book is the easiest and fastest way to get hands-on experience using Apple frameworks and technologies like Reality Composer, RealityKit, and ARKit — all the available rendering technologies Apple has to offer, as well as a collection of fun projects for creating various real-world AR experiences.

After reading this book, you’ll have a deep understanding of the technologies and frameworks used to create powerful, immersive AR experiences for the Apple platform.

Take a deep dive into:

AR Quick Look: Discover how to integrate AR Quick Look into your apps to give them some cool AR superpowers. Reality Composer & Reality Files: Find out how to leverage the power of Reality Composer to create interactive AR-based experiences. Reality Converter & PBR Materials: Discover how PBR materials can add a level of realism to your AR objects, and how you can use Reality Converter to convert, view and customize USDZ content. RealityKit: Find out how to set up and use RealityKit to build a face-based augmented reality app. Facial Blend Shapes: Build a fully interactive augmented reality face mask that reacts to your facial expressions using blend shapes. ARKit: Get a complete introduction to ARKit, Apple’s framework for creating fully interactive augmented reality, and learn about the different types of rendering options available with ARKit. Raycasting & Physics: Learn about raycasting, 2D hit-testing and the SpriteKit physics engine as you add more features and functionality to your game. ECS & Collaborative Experiences: Build a collaborative AR experience and learn how to create and manage a multipeer connection.

Advanced iOS App Architecture

Implement Modern Clean Architectures in Your iOS Apps!

Apps are becoming more complex, and development teams are being pressured to deliver faster results in the face of constantly changing requirements. Now, more than ever, you need to understand and apply good software architecture practices in your projects.

Advanced iOS App Architecture thoroughly explains multiple modern iOS architectures, and demonstrates their usage in real-world apps.

The first half of the book introduces you to different aspects of iOS app architectures. We recommend reading these chapters before diving into any of the specific architecture chapters to get a good handle on the concepts involved.

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.

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.