We’ve been hard at work over the past few months updating our book, Thinking in SwiftUI. In recent years we have had the opportunity to conduct SwiftUI workshops for many companies. Based on that experience and the feedback we’ve received, our approach to explaining SwiftUI has evolved a lot. For this reason we decided to completely rewrite the book to make it equal to our workshops.
The general structure is still very similar to the previous edition, but the content is completely new. In this new edition, we place a lot of emphasis on explaining view trees (which will actually be the first chapter of the book), as well as how view trees are interpreted in terms of state, layout, animations, and more. The book includes a host of new diagrams to help visualize these concepts.
After WWDC we were a bit torn about what to do. Should we put out a book without mentioning all the new stuff? For people targeting iOS 17/macOS 14, that would be weird. However, rewriting the entire book just for iOS 17 is not an option either, as many of us still need to support older platforms. Instead, we have decided to supplement the current chapters with information fields and to point out relevant changes. In addition, we will have our own iOS 17 chapter for the time being. For the final release of the book (once the new content has left beta) we will try to integrate the content of this chapter into the rest of the book.
Due to this transition phase, we have decided to release the new edition as a beta version. We plan to release chapters one at a time while incorporating new iOS 17 themes. We will also be hosting a weekly Q&A live stream during this pre-release period. The first live stream will take place today (Friday 16 June) at 18:00 GMT+1 (9:00 am PST). You can submit your questions to us at this Github repository .
Up to now we have updated all our books for free since we started objc.io (over ten years ago!). As this update of Thinking in SwiftUI is not an incremental but a complete rewrite from the ground up, we have decided to release it as a new product – the pre-release is available now . However, if you’ve already bought our book and can’t afford the update, or just bought the book recently, just send us an email and we’ll get you a free update.
