Acknowledgements

Ten versions of iOS (neé iPhone OS), and we’ve now managed to get Prags books out for half of them: 3, 6, 8, 9, and 10—more than half, if you recall there was no App Store or public SDK for version 1. Now that these releases have become an annual thing, we might finally be getting the hang of this.

My thanks for the latest edition start as always with Pragmatic Programmers, who have an efficient, comfortable workflow that gets out of authors’ way and lets us write. (Rule number one for any competitors who might happen to be reading this: if you make authors use MS Word, add another two months to the schedule.) With Dave Thomas’s retirement in 2016, Andy Hunt is doing a fine job of running the ship, and it’s always a pleasure to work with the staff there, including Susannah Davidson Pfalzer and Janet Furlow. Most of all, it’s important to have an editor whom I click with. Rebecca Gulick keeps me from going too deep into the woods of pounding out replicable instructions and makes sure I deliver the “big picture” themes and ideas of every chapter. Finally, I want to give a shout out to Prags’s other iOS authors, including Jeff Kelley, Christina Moulton, Marcus Zarra, and Erica Sadun. And to Janie Clayton, who had other obligations and couldn’t be a big part of this edition, but is always available on Twitter for constructive feedback or at least pictures of cooking and pugs.

I’ve had a day job doing Swift for a couple years now, and the important thing about it isn’t just the language, but also working in an environment where the craft and quality of the code is of such high importance. So thanks to all my colleagues at MathElf (http://mathelf.com) for all the rigor in peer reviews, and Dan Kokotov in particular for pushing me hard to move past twenty years of accumulated bad habits.

In this edition, we’ve based our major example around writing a podcast client app. Part of the reason we did this is because there are so many good podcasts by and for iOS developers; hopefully, you’ll check some of them out. Thanks to the CocoaConf Podcast (Dave Klein, Daniel Steinberg, and Cesare Rocchi) and Core Intuition (Daniel Jalkut and Manton Reece) for letting us feature them in our sample code and screenshots.

A big part of Prags’s books is the feedback cycle, and this title benefits greatly from the input of our tech reviewers: Zach Jaquish, Jeff Kelley (him again!), Kevin Kim, and Scott Stevenson. I’m also grateful to everyone who posted to the book’s forum or submitted errata during the book’s beta, including (but hardly limited to) Mark Horrocks, David Lindelöf, Noah Patterson, Sean M. Paus, and Robert Sherwood.

Personally, it’s been a difficult couple of years. Thanks to everyone I leaned on through iMessage or Twitter DM.

Obligatory end-of-book music check: this time it was Manic Street Preachers, BABYMETAL, Of Monsters and Men, The Flaming Lips, David Bowie, and Electric Light Orchestra. Current musical stats at http://www.last.fm/user/invalidname.