DAY 8
Structs, part one
I know some of you might be keen to charge on with today’s new Swift learning, but hold up: you just finished learning about closures, which are a difficult topic. And you came back for more. Seriously, that deserves a lot of respect.
And I have some good news for you. First, not only will we be covering closures again in a consolidation day next week, but soon enough we’ll also start putting them into practice in real iOS projects. So, even if you aren’t 100% sure of how they work or why they are needed, it will all become clear – stick with it!
Anyway, today’s topic is structs. Structs let us create our own data types out of several small types. For example, you might put three strings and a boolean together and say that represents a user in your app.
These custom types – users, games, documents, and more – form the real core of the software we build. If you get those right then often your code will follow.
As Fred Brooks, the author of the hugely influential book The Mythical Man-Month, once said, “the programmer at wit’s end... can often do best by disentangling themself from their code, rearing back, and contemplating their data. Representation is the essence of programming.”
Today you have seven one-minute videos to watch, and you’ll learn how to create your own types, adding properties, methods, and more. Once you’ve completed each video, there is a short piece of optional extra reading if you’re looking to get some more details, and there’s also a short test to help make sure you’ve understood what was taught.
- Creating your own structs
- Computed properties
- Property observers
- Optional: When should you use property observers?
- Optional: When should you use willSet rather than didSet?
- Test: Property observers
- Methods
- Optional: What’s the difference between a function and a method?
- Test: Methods
- Mutating methods
- Optional: Why do we need to mark some methods as mutating?
- Test: Mutating methods
- Properties and methods of strings
- Optional: Why are strings structs in Swift?
- Test: Properties and methods of strings
- Properties and methods of arrays
Have some questions about structs?
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