New Book: Escape from Tutorial Hell

29th May 2025 • 574 words • 3 minutes reading time.

#Book #Swift #SwiftUI #Xcode #macOS

I've written a new book, and this one is quite different from my previous books. Instead of being a coding guide, this one is a guide to designing, building, shipping and maintaining real apps. It does include some coding, but the emphasis is on the process, not the code. As usual, I concentrate on macOS but the core principles apply to all Apple platforms.

I wrote this book for people who have done some tutorials, read books, watched videos, and who know some Swift and SwiftUI but are finding it difficult to make the leap from there to working on their own apps. It's also for more experienced developers who want to learn how to design and structure their projects to make them easier to maintain.

The book is completely written but is still being edited, so I'm offering a pre-release edition at a discount. You'll receive the complete book as a free upgrade when it releases in June, if you buy the pre-release.

You can buy the book from Gumroad and you can read the introduction and first chapter for free at Escape from Tutorial Hell Sample.

Book cover

Go Beyond Coding: Build, Ship, and Maintain Real Apps

When learning to code, everyone hits a block at a certain point. You've read books and articles, watched videos, done tutorials and courses. You feel like you know what's being taught - the code is familiar and you can write small functions when told what the functions should do, but now what? How do you take that knowledge and use it to write a complete app? You're stuck in tutorial hell so how do you escape?

This book aims to fill in that gap and take you from a person who knows the basics of Swift and SwiftUI to a developer with an app that's designed, built, shipped and ready to be maintained.

Contents

Section I: Configuring Your Tools

  • Set up Xcode
  • Set up Git & GitHub

Section II: Designing the App

  • What will we build together?
  • Explore MapKit
  • Use test data to layout the UI
  • Include some Mac-specific features: icons, about, help

Section III: Setting up the Data Flow

  • Use a playground to test the API
  • Work out the data models
  • Import the models into the project

Section IV: Working With Xcode

  • Structure the project
  • Format the files consistently
  • Documentation
  • Debugging
  • Using a 3rd party library
  • Testing

Section V: Coding with AI

  • Code completion
  • Using AI chat

Section VI: Distributing the App

  • Distribution - App Store
  • Distribution - external

All the code and extra materials for the book can be downloaded from GitHub.

Thanks to...

Peter, my Language Engineer. Despite being in the middle of a huge move, he has managed to squeeze in the time to fix my commas and other grammatical blunders.

And of course, Tim, my constant source of support, advice, inspiration and many, many cups of tea and coffee.

Feedback

I would love to hear from anyone who has read the book, loved it, hated it, found an error or just wanted to say hi.

If you find any errors in the code, please let me know by opening an issue at the GitHub page.

You can contact me directly using any of the contact links at the bottom of this page or through the Contact page.