My iOS development book list
There are thousands of iOS development books flying around. Still, many are outdated, incomplete, or not the best option (not to say mediocre), so whether if you are starting with iOS development or want to improve your skills, this is an excellent place to start.
This list is not static, and I’m always looking for new books about iOS development, so if you have any recommendations, please leave them in the comments section.
1. iOS Apprentice ($60) — [Beginner]
Ray Wenderlich’s flagship book is by far the best one for the ones coming to the platform. It has everything to get you started, good coverage on Xcode, Swift, and the most common frameworks you’ll need, all explained with easy to follow tutorials. It has also been updated to Swift 5.1 and includes a Swift UI introductory chapter.
2. The Swift Programming Language (Free) — [Beginner]
Yup, completely free and available online. This boon is part of the official documentation and a great resource to get started or update yourself with the latest Swift version for both the stable and upcoming releases. It is well written, full of examples is always up to date, so don’t ignore it.
3. SwiftUI Essentials ($32) — [Beginner]
This book is the first one that I’ve found with a decent amount of useful information about SwiftUI. It includes the key concepts, architecture principles, and sort of a guided tour on SwiftUI views, stacks, frames, and forms. It also explains data handling, state observables, and even the basics of animations and transitions.
Written to teach you everything you need to know to build iOS apps, this book includes a guide to Xcode and Swift programming, so if you are not already an iOS developer, this book is also a good start.
4. Swift Algorithms & Data Structures ($39) — [Intermediate]
If you are thinking about applying to a new job as an iOS developer, this book is a must. It covers all the standard stuff about algorithms and data structures in Swift 5 and will help you pass the technical interview. It’s easy to read and comes with example playgrounds (paid separately) to help you sharpen your skills.
5. Advanced iOS App Architecture ($55) — [Intermediate]
If you are starring to look into architecture patterns for iOS, this book is the perfect starting point. It covers key concepts such as Dependency injection, factories, and containers, and puts them in practice via simple examples and exercises, later on, explains MVVM and Redux.
6. Practical Artificial Intelligence with Swift ($30) — [Intermediate]
I just discovered this book a week ago, and it is an interesting overview of the main things you can do in Swift (and iOS), with CoreML and CreateML. Exercises and cover the major APIs for Vision, Audio, Language & Language/Text and Motion, some bits of Tensorflow, and integrating Swift and Python.
7. Advanced Swift ($49) — [Advanced]
If you have been writing Swift for a while, this book by Chris Eidhof and Florian Kugler (the objc.io guys) is a deep dive into Swift features. It covers a lot, from low-level programming to high-level abstractions, and is the perfect sequel to the official Apple Documentation. You can also purchase it with the Videos packages or an objc.io subscription.
8. App Architecture: iOS Application design patterns in Swift ($45) — [Advanced]
I already included a book on architecture, but this one, also from the guys at objc.io, goes way beyond. It explores architecture patterns from classic to experimental from a more technical perspective and is a good option if you want to go deeper.
Promising books coming up
These books are not available yet, but look very promising, so it might be worth to check them out when they are released or jump over and pre-order them.
Hands-on Augmented Reality with ARKit ($45)
I have not found a good ARKit book yet. Most books out there are compilations of tutorials without much depth. This book by Packt promises to break that trend as a more structured, but practical guide. It’s available for pre-order from Amazon.
Thinking in Swift UI ($39)
Many of us are struggling to find Swift UI useful in the real world, as it’s still a very young framework. This book, (currently on pre-release), and also from the objc.io guys is supposed to be written around transitioning your way of thinking from the object-oriented style of UIKit to the declarative form of Swift UI. So it seems like a great sequel to the SwiftUI Essentials mentioned above.
If you have more books ideas, feel to follow me and send them on Twitter. See you soon!.
Photo, thanks to: Kimberly Farmer