iOS 11 Programming Fundamentals with Swift: Swift, Xcode, and Cocoa Basics

I cannot emphasize how much I love this book. I aspire to be able to publish my first iOS application and to become an iOS developer. This is the book for me. I was hesitant at first to order the book due to the small sample of reviews and the simple fact I do not have a lot of money to spend. Which was at first why I turned to cheaper alternatives, i.e.- MOOC courses such as Udemy, free online readings, or Youtube. However, I felt as if I was obtaining a false sense of accomplishment. Sure it was nice to see quick results through following project samples, but in the end I was left with too many questions and felt I was not learning how I wanted to. Of course I was learning, but a good book provides so much more! I like to be able to imagine, and although it may in my personal opinion it is slower to learn using a book in the sense that it takes time to make the connections, apply what you learned, and see the results; a good book as this one is, is always worth reading! I already purchased the Programming iOS 11 by Matt Neburg, because I already know I am going to jump right into reading that book when I finish this one!--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------UPDATE: Something that is imperative for customers to understand before purchasing this book, is it is a LONG read! To add to that you should not expect to just be reading this book by itself from cover to cover and assume that to be enough. I have read about 200-250 pages over the last month and have learned so much. What I would recommend is for those starting out if they decide to purchase this book is do the following.1) Find a online course to COMMIT to Udemy/Treehouse/Udacity/Stanfords(FREE course)2) Read Apples FREE Swift programming book3) BUY this book; you may very well be reading out of order (As I am), but you will truly learn the fundamentals, and "under the hood" knowledge that will greatly benefit you. It gives you a new way of thinking things that are not given from online videos or books.After reading the free Swift 4 Programming book from Apple, I go to this book to read up on the same topic, and I always have that "ah-HAH!" moment. That said, I certainly look forward to Neuburg's future books and thank him so much for sharing his knowledge!

There are two ways of learning how to program iOS I guess - one is to watch a few videos, do a few tutorials and then dive right in and get started. The problem with that approach is that you'll probably make a lot of mistakes, create bad habits that are difficult to fix later and will need a few tries to get it to work.The other approach is to learn everything beforehand and then get started, knowing what you're doing. This book (and its companion by the same author) definitely is geared toward the second approach. I tried approach #1 briefly and failed miserably - there was just too much I didn't know, and there were too many things that just didn't work and I had no idea how to fix them. Some protocol wasn't defined, some error message about a nib... This book explains what a protocol in swift is, what a nib is and does, and then I was able to help myself.Working through this book cleared up a lot of things. The author really does a thorough and logical approach to teach the basics and then build on top of that. This is also better, for learning, than the Apple documentation. While free, it doesn't present the information in a didactic order - and order matters. By reading through the first couple of hundred pages of this book I've probably saved me weeks of trial-and-error and frustration. If you're the type of person for which videos don't work well as a learning method, and you'd like to understand how things work and get a systematic approach, get this book! What you don't get is a step-by-step approach (do this, click this, drag that) to get to your first app - but you don't really need to. After working through this you just know what you need to do, and it'll be much clearer, even though to get to that point will take a little bit of time.

All of the 1 star reviews are people who are idiots, plain and simple. This is a goregous book, that teaches you Swift in a fast-paced and in-depth way. These 1 star people clearly are looking for YouTube tutorials, which, if you've enjoyed this book like I have, you know those quick fix resources are trash. All of these complaints are people who do not understand that you need to put the work into to create professional grade software. It takes years to do this stuff. There is no royal road.If you're coming from a different (esp. a dynamically typed) language where you have a solid grasp on the fundamentals, do not skip this book and proceed to the next after thinking you've got the gist of Swift by skimming Apple's documentation. I began to read the this initially with my account on the publisher's website, and purchased the next book to have a hard copy of, thinking it would be the more useful to have laying around.This turned out to be such a great read that I also went ahead and ordered a hard copy of this as well. I appreciate that it does not waste your time and gets deep into it right away. Loved it and felt immediately challenged by chapter 2 learning Swift's great syntax. This is my second week in Swift 4 and all of the questions I had about Cocoa and the general app architecture have all been resolved after spending hours skimming sites and videos trying to get a clear, high level picture. That being said, from a code perspective, it is dense, but extremely well edited, with each paragraph presenting a new topic in-depth.

Don't buy this book if your goal is to learn to make iOS apps. You see nothing but isolated snippets that you don't know what to do with or have any context on for literally hundreds of pages.What a horrible, horrible idea for a book. I feel so stupid for buying this.