At this point, we have covered a lot in the book. Swift is not a small topic and app development itself is orders of magnitude bigger than that. We learned most of Swift but it would not have been practical to cover every little feature of the language and Swift is still a new and evolving language. You are never going to be able to keep everything you've learned in your memory without being able to refer to it later. You can always refer back to this book but Apple's documentation can be a great reference too. Beyond that, if you truly want to become a proficient Swift developer, you can ensure your success by always learning and evolving. It is extremely hard to do that in a vacuum. The best way to ensure that you are keeping up with the times is to follow and participate in the community around whatever topics interest you the most. In this chapter, we will go over how to use Apple's documentation and some suggestions on where you can find and participate in the Swift, iOS, and OS X developer community. More specifically, in this chapter we will cover:
- Apple's documentation
- Forums and blogs
- Prominent figures
- Podcasts
Apple puts a lot of time and effort into maintaining its documentation. This documentation can often be a very valuable tool to determine how you are expected to interact with their frameworks.
Xcode actually integrates with the documentation quite well. One of the main ways you can look at the documentation is within the Quick Help inspector. You can display it by navigating to View | Utilities | Show Quick Help Inspector from the main menu. This inspector shows you the documentation of whatever piece of code you currently have your cursor on. If that particular class, method, or function is a part of Apple's frameworks, you will get some quick help with regards to it, as shown in the following screenshot:
Here the cursor is on UICollectionView, so the Quick Help inspector gives us the high-level information about it.
You can also look at the documentation in its own window if you need more information or want to do more exploring. You can open up this window at any time by navigating to Help | Documentation and API Reference and you can search for any topic you want. However, you can also jump right to a specific piece of code's documentation by holding the Option key and double-clicking on it. For example, if you were to hold the Option key and double-click on isSourceTypeAvailable, you would get the following full documentation window:
This window acts very similar to the Web. You can navigate through the documentation by clicking on any of the links or searching for a completely unrelated topic. You can also jump to specific parts of a documentation page using the outline view on the left-hand side of the screen.
This documentation is particularly useful when you already have a sense of what parts of the framework you need to use for a particular task. You can then use this documentation to figure out the specifics of how to properly use that part of the framework. As you get better acquainted with Apple's frameworks, this will become more useful, because it is relatively easy to remember what parts of the framework you use for all of the common tasks, but it is far more difficult and often impractical to remember exactly how they work. However, sometimes the documentation is not enough. The next place you should look for answers is online.