A Combine Kickstart (PragProg)

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Daniel H Steinberg

Combine is about to replace all those techniques for asynchronously passing information around in an iOS or macOS App: Target-Action, callbacks, closures, delegates, notifications… all of them.

This hands-on, fast-moving kickstart introduces you to the future of declarative and reactive programming on Apple platforms. We focus on core concepts and building discrete, easy-to-understand, pieces of a pipeline that allows your app to react to changes in the state.

In your typical iOS or Mac app, the controller sees the view and the model and can send them messages directly. But how do they communicate back?

We have decades of experience using all sorts of devices. They all work fine but they all work differently.

The Combine framework unifies these different modes of communication into a single pattern. In fact, Apple has wrapped traditional methods like Notification, Timers, URLSession, and even KVO in Combine publishers so that they can participate as well.

We start with a UIKit example and transition to SwiftUI so that you can see that no matter which framework you are using for your user interface, the time is right for Combine. You’ll quickly understand the four pillars of Combine: publishers, subscribers, subscriptions, and operators and start building out pipelines that connect far away sources.

This code-along book is filled with examples that covers a myriad of use cases while providing you with the mental model to apply these techniques to your own projects.

This work was written and produced entirely by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.

Daniel H Steinberg is the author of more than a dozen books including the best selling books , A SwiftUI Kickstart, A Swift Kickstart, A Swift Kickstart, Second Edition, and Dear Elena. He has written apps for the iPhone and the iPad since the SDKs first appeared and has written programs for the Mac all the way back to System 7.

Daniel presents iOS, Functional Programming, SwiftUI, and Swift training and consults through his company Dim Sum Thinking. When he’s not coding or talking about coding for the Mac, the iPhone, and the iPad he’s probably cooking, baking bread, or hanging out with friends. Details on his training and speaking are on the Dim Sum Thinking website.

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