Swift Style »

Explore common Swift coding challenges and the best solutions. From spacing, bracing, and semicolons to proper API style, discover the whys behind each recommendation, and add to or establish your own house style guidelines. This practical, powerful, and opinionated guide offers the best practices you need to know to work successfully in this equally opinionated programming language.

April PragPub »

• What Is Low-Code?
• Low-Code Mobile Development
• Mob Programming vs. Pair Programming
• Refactoring to Functional Style in Java 8

Plus: On Tap, Swaine’s World, New Manager’s Playbook, Johanna on Managing Product Development, Antonio on Books, The BoB Pages, Shady Illuminations

Recently Released:

• iOS 10 SDK Development 
• Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix 
• A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms 
• Design It! 

Wow, thank you everyone for the incredible response to our new title, Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix (pragprog.com/book/lhelph). We haven't seen this massive level of excitement in a long time; maybe since the earliest days of Ruby on Rails. Perhaps the functional folks are onto something here.

On the front-end side of the world, avoid buggy, messy code and level up your Swift programming under iOS with Swift Style: An Opinionated Guide to an Opinionated Language. It's now in print and shipping from pragprog.com/book/esswift. Don't miss the intro video available at youtube.com/watch?v=i98dje0o2WY.

And of course, the code you don't write has no bugs at all. See how to write less code, go beyond pair programming, and more, all in this month’s PragPub magazine now available from theprosegarden.com.

What a time to be alive.

Dig in!

Swift Style: An Opinionated Guide to an Opinionated Language

Apple's Swift programming language has finally reached stability, and developers are demanding to know how to program the language properly. Swift Style guides you through the ins and outs of Swift programming best practices. This is the first best practices book for serious, professional Swift programmers and for programmers who want to shine their skills to be hired in this demanding market.

A style guide offers a consistent experience of well-crafted code that lets you focus on the code's underlying meaning, intent, and implementation. This book doesn't offer canonical answers on Swift coding style. It explores the areas of Swift where structure comes into play. Whether you're developing a personal style or a house style, there are always ways to enhance your code choices. You'll find here the ideas and principles to establish or enhance your own best style practices.

Begin with simple syntactical styling. Strengthen code bracing for easy readability. Style your closures for safety and resilience. Perfect spacing and layout. Master literal initialization and typing. Optimize control flow layout and improve conditional style choices. Transition from Objective-C and move code into Swift the right way. Boost API design using proper naming and labeling. Elevate defaulted arguments and variadics to their right places. Finally, Erica offers her own broad recommendations on good coding practice.

Now in print from pragprog.com/book/esswift.

April PragPub Magazine

What if you could get the same work done with a tenth the coding effort?

Low-code is an increasingly popular approach to programming that leverages visual development tools and third-party infrastructure so you can focus on the ten percent of your app that is unique. A low-code development platform bundles together all the tools you use into a unified experience that lets you build your application visually. Then once it’s built, the platform handles the full lifecycle, through test, production, and ongoing maintenance. It’s especially appealing for mobile app development, where time to market is king.

This month in PragPub we explore the low-code experience in two articles. First, Matthew Revell details just what low-code is and how you work in a low-code environment. Then Stanley Idesis walks you through a full hands-on example of mobile development on a low-code platform. Is low-code right for you? At the end of these articles you’ll know all you need to know to decide whether you need to give it a try.

Mob programming is an extrapolation from pair programming. If two programmers working together at the same computer on the same program is good, maybe a mob of programmers working together at the same computer on the same program is better. Mob programmers don’t usually claim that mob programming is necessarily better than pair programming, but rather that it has different advantages. But Mark Pearl claims that it does have some definite advantages over pair programming, and he lists and explains them in this issue.

All this year Venkat Subramaniam is writing about refactoring iterative code to functional style in Java 8. This month his series focuses on joining values, which he explores in three increasingly challenging before-and-after refactoring exercises. The lessons he’s teaching here will make your code better, no matter what language you’re working in.

And you’ll find all the regular features you expect in this month’s PragPub. Johanna Rothman is talking about how to talk to your boss, while Marcus Blankenship is talking about how to talk to your team if you’re the boss. Antonio Cangiano is excited about learning the technology underlying cryptocurrency, while John Shade is skeptical about chatbots. And the editor has pulled together some interesting science and tech stories from the last month, along with a tech-oriented puzzle.

We hope you enjoy the issue!

Now available from theprosegarden.com.

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