Flight School
Flight School is a book series for advanced Swift developers that explores essential topics in iOS and macOS development through concise, focused guides.
Today, I’m excited to announce updates to our guides to Swift Codable and Numbers, as well as a brand new Guide to Swift Strings. Everything is up-to-date with the latest from Swift 5 and Xcode 10.2, and now — for the first time — available in print!
If you like NSHipster and are looking for something a bit longer, I think you’re gonna love what Flight School has to offer.
Why I’m Writing Flight School
As software developers, our jobs require us to learn a variety of different platforms, programming languages, frameworks, and tools. In spite of their differences, most technologies share a common foundation in concepts like floating-point arithmetic, data interchange, and string encoding — the kinds of things you might find in a typical Computer Science curriculum.
But for those of us who came into programming from unconventional backgrounds, (for instance, I studied philosophy and linguistics as an undergraduate), the weight of all of this can feel overwhelming at times. And even if you did study CS in college, it may be hard to relate the theory of your coursework (what you can remember of it, anyway) to the realities of your day job.
I’m writing Flight School to explore important concepts in software development in a way that’s informative, accessible, and entertaining.
Each book is short enough to be read over a weekend (or perhaps coffee breaks over the course of a work week). Each chapter is filled with practical information that’s backed by examples that you can experiment with for yourself in Xcode Playgrounds.
The forthcoming Guide to Strings
is our newest and most ambitious release yet,
covering everything from the Unicode® standard and Swift 5 String internals
to binary-to-text encoding, parser generators, and natural language processing.
If you’ve ever felt like you wanted to get a handle on text once and for all,
this is the book for you.
It’ll be available to download next Friday, February 8th, and you can pre-order a copy for yourself and download a sample chapter now.
The response from Flight School readers since launching earlier last year has been overwhelming, and I couldn’t be more excited to share this with everyone.
I look forward to continuing to share new and interesting things on NSHipster and Flight School, and thank you for your continued support. 🧡