Playgrounds are an essential Swift development tool. They offer interactive environments where you develop and test code, a little at a time. In playgrounds, you determine if and how well your routines work. You investigate the results your code produces. You tweak, you test, you explore.
Once you start using playgrounds, you'll wish they existed for Objective-C. Playgrounds provide instant gratification for every line of code you type. Imagine creating fully operational code elements in just a few lines. You see APIs, functions, and methods spring to life, ready for testing and refinement. Apple has invested a lot of work into making these environments a fantastic touch point for language development support.
Swift playgrounds create platforms for learning Swift language specifics. With their instantaneous feedback, you focus on building a class, learning an API, or perfecting a line of code without having to commit to an entire project at once. Playgrounds aren't toys. They build real-world views, preview graphics, video, and audio using real-world Swift code. With a little cleverness, you can even deploy code to the iOS simulator.
Playgrounds create the perfect solution for hit and run coding. They allow you to explore an API or develop a routine without tying yourself into full application development. Instead, they offer focused building environments. You experiment with just those features you need to, creating clarity of purpose and a minimum of expended effort.
With the introduction of rich-text documentation tools, there's even more you can do with playgrounds. Playgrounds offer the potential for developers to talk to other developers and teachers to talk to CS students beyond the scope of web pages, PDF files, and even ebooks. You see a little of this promise in iBooks but the language there is JavaScript and HTML and the tools aren't geared at a programmer audience for production or consumption. Playground documents offer a magical combination of interactivity and exploration.
Playgrounds don't just document an API or an algorithm. They demonstrate how these features work, allowing their audience to tweak parameter and provide a live working sample that can be ported to app implementation or get ingrained into the brain for that all important final exam. Playgrounds enable you to mix the purely technical with the pedagogical.
There is much to playgrounds that is simple and obvious. There's even more that's powerful and loaded with potential. This short book discusses playground techniques both plain and advanced that will boost your development power.
You start by learning to create playgrounds and explore their built-in features. You read about accessing built-in documentation, customizing the workspace, and pushing the built-in editing features to their limits. You also discover how playground execution works and how you can build asynchronous routines that keep working after the last line of code.
Playground Secrets and Power Tips pushes beyond the basics to expose the hidden power of the Swift playground. Let bestselling tech author Erica Sadun guide you through this new, exciting tool.
