Developing Mobile Games Using Swift

The book is mostly an intstruction manual to setup pre-built games. You are basically copy/pasting code from the book into XCode in a piecemeal fashion to see how certain aspects of the game come together, very much like you'd build a piece of Ikea furniture. This is fun in practice, and mostly works, except that some small code snippets (e.g., single function calls) are not blocked off in the same way the larger multi-line snippets are, which makes them easy to miss, and some other compile and runtime issues. Be sure to read every line of the book so you don't miss any instructions, which are not easily discernable from the "here's what this line does" explanations. There are also a few lines the author forgets to instruct you to do (e.g., declarting class variable shieldProgressbar in the space ship game) that you have to figure out for yourself in order to make the project build. There was also a type issue where I had to change a couple of as to as!, but still could not avoid the occasional EXC_BAD_INSTRUCTION fault on bulletCollidesEnemy. The author should go through all of the games from scratch to ensure the instructions make sense and tweak the organizational formatting, ensure the games compile with the latest Swift, and ensure they do not throw runtime errors.

Very impressed that I emailed the author with a questoin on a weekend and he replied back within 30 minutes! (and it turned out that I missed something, it wasn't an issue with the book) My daughter and I are having fun building our own customized version of flappy bird thanks to this book!