Flight School

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Flight School
Guide to Swift Strings

A comprehensive reference for working with text in Swift and Foundation.

Swift has one of the best string implementations you’ll find in a programming language’s standard library. But in order to use it to maximum effect, you’ll need to understand a few things about the Unicode standard as well as the functionality Swift inherits from the Foundation framework.

Flight School’s Guide to Swift Strings covers these topics in depth, offering insights that you won’t find anywhere else.

Building upon these concepts, the book also explores advanced topics like binary-to-text encoding, regular expressions, parser generators, and natural language processing.

This book is recommended for developers who want to get a solid understanding of Unicode and how to make the most of the text system on iOS and macOS. It’s a whirlwind journey of the that’s guaranteed to delight anyone with a love for language.

  • Navigate Swift 5 String types

  • Understand essential Unicode concepts

  • Inter-operate with Foundation framework String APIs

  • Use and implement binary-to-text encoding formats like Base64

  • Parse messages using regular expressions and context-free grammars

  • Use the Natural Language framework to build a classifier, Markov chain, spell checker, and more

About the Author

Mattt is a developer and writer in Portland, Oregon. He worked 3 years at Apple as a technical writer, contributing to The Swift Programming Language, Swift Package Manager, and Swift.org.

Before that, Mattt founded NSHipster, a weekly publication for iOS and macOS developers, and maintained several open source libraries, including Alamofire and AFNetworking.

About Flight School

Founded in 2018, Flight School is an independently-published book series for advanced Swift developers interested in taking their skills to the next level.

Our mission is to write the kinds of programming books we wish we had when we were first starting out — material that connects the computer science theory with practical insights from experience working in the software industry.

…all of that, plus a sprinkle of code samples and trivia from the world of aviation. It’s an unconventional combination, but we think you’re gonna love it. 💙