Advanced Swift

Swift encapsulates many different programming philosophies, it supports a number of different programming paradigms, and includes many of the most proven and successful developments in programming languages from the last decade or so.

Some of the borders have moved over time too: enumerations (or enums) and protocols have become so much more powerful that they can often replace the class-based hierarchies that have ruled the object-orientated roost for so long; control flow statements have become incredibly flexible; custom operators are easy to create; and perhaps most importantly of all, functions have become first class entities (we'll see what that means in a while).

In this chapter, you will learn about the following:

• Control flow
• Functions
• Enumerations
• Protocols
• Custom operators
• Array and dictionary operations

We can't cover all of Swift here, but we can ensure that there will be no obstacles to understanding what the subsequent chapters cover in terms of the Swift language.