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.

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.

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.

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!