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Concurrency by Tutorials

Nov 25 2019 , Swift 5.1, iOS 13, Xcode 11

The book that teaches you everything there is to know about how to write performant and concurrent code for your iOS apps. By Scott Grosch.

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Who is this for?

This book is for intermediate iOS developers who already know the basics of iOS and Swift development but want to learn how to make their app efficiently perform tasks without affecting performance, and how to properly divide work to utilize hardware to the fullest extent.

Covered concepts

  • Grand central dispatch
  • Operations and operation queues
  • Common concurrency problems
  • Threads and thread sanitizer

Dive Into Concurrency in Your iOS Apps!

Learn what is Concurrency and why would you even want to utilize it in your apps? Learn about Grand Central Dispatch, Apple’s implementation of C’s libdispatch, also known as GCD, as it’s one of the simplest ways to queue up tasks to be...

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Before You Begin

This section tells you a few things you need to know before you get started, such as what you’ll need for hardware and software, where to find the project files for this book, and more.

i
What You Need
ii
Book Source Code & Forums
iii
About the Cover

Section I: Getting Started with Concurrency

In this part of the book, you’re going to learn about the basics of Concurrency. You’re going to learn what it is, what kind of problems it solves, and why would you even use it?

Further, you will learn the basic pieces of which Concurrency comprises in iOS development: Grand Central Dispatch and Operations.

This section will provide you with the foundational knowledge regarding Concurrency, so be sure to read through! The upcoming sections will dive much deeper into each of these concepts individually.

1
Introduction
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Get a quick overview of what concurrency is and why you might want to use it.
2
GCD vs. Operations
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Concurrency can be handled by either Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) or Operations. Learn about the differences.

Section II: Grand Central Dispatch

In this section, you’ll take a deep dive into Apple’s most popular and easy-to-use mechanism to write and manage concurrent tasks — Grand Central Dispatch. You’ll learn how to utilize queues and threads to control the execution of tasks in your app, as well as how to group these tasks together. You’ll also learn about common pitfalls and dangers of using concurrency, and how you can avoid them.

3
Queues & Threads
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This chapter teaches you how to use a GCD queue to offload work from the main thread. You'll also learn what a "thread" is.
Groups & Semaphores
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In the previous chapter you learned about how queues work. In this chapter you'll expand that knowledge to learn how to submit multiple tasks to a queue which need to run together as a "group" so that you can be notified when they have all completed. You'll also learn how to wrap an existing API so that you can call it asynchronously.
Concurrency Problems
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By now you know how GCD can make your app so much faster. This chapter will show you some of the dangers of concurrency if you're not careful, and how to avoid them.

Section III: Operations

Even though Grand Central Dispatch provides most of the concurrency capabilties you’ll need right out-of-the-box, sometimes you’ll want some extra customizability. This is where Operations come into play. This section will teach you about Operations, Operation Queues, and everything in between.

Operations
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In this chapter you'll switch gears and start learning about the Operations class, which allows for much more powerful control over your concurrent tasks.
Operation Queues
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Similar to the Dispatch Queues you learned about back in Chapter 3, the Operation class uses an OperationQueue to perform a similar function.
Asynchronous Operations
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Now that you can create an Operation and submit it to a queue, you'll learn how to make the operation itself asynchronous. While not something you'll do regularly, it's important to know that it's possible.
Operation Dependencies
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The "killer feature" of Operations is being able to tell the OS that one operation is dependent on another and shouldn't being until the dependency has finished.
Canceling Operations
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There are times when you need to stop an operation that is running, or has yet to start. This chapter will teach you the concepts that you need to be aware of to support cancelation.

Section IV: Real-Life Concurrency

To wrap up this book, this section will be dedicated to showing you how all of the knowledge you’ve accumulated throughout this book could be used for some real-life purposes.

In this section, you’ll take a deeper dive into a common case where concurrency plays a huge role — Core Data — as well as learn about Apple’s Thread Sanitizer as a great tool to debug and resolve concurrency issues and confusions.

Core Data
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Core Data works well with concurrency as long as you keep a few simple rules in mind. This chapter will teach you how to make sure that your Core Data app is able to handle concurrency properly.
Thread Sanitizer
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Data races occur when multiple threads access the same memory without synchronization and at least one access is a write. This chapter will teach you how to use Apple's Thread Sanitizer to detect data races.
Conclusion