I don’t like to step on anyone’s work. Having taught university computer science for a decade, I can tell you that it is difficult to present technical material in a way that is both correct and engaging. My students’ surveys remind me every semester that 100% satisfaction is elusive. But I want to critique the writing style of a book on Swift that I just browsed at Barnes and Noble. If you are easily tripped up on vague or ambiguous descriptions, please know that we share this obsessive trait.

See the section subtitled Building Blocks of Swift, in bold? It establishes the very basic programming concept of named storage, called variables in most material even if their values never change. The unchanging named values are also called constants. In Swift, these named values are declared with the syntax var variableName=value for variables and with let constantName=value for constants.

These are my complaints :

• The first paragraph explains variables and constants, but only gives the keyword var for variables. What about let for constants? This leaves me hanging.
• The sample code below P1 is obviously not illustrative of the example described, even though it prefaces the code with “as shown in this example:”.
• The sample code below P1 contains errors! The reassignment of the constant will break at compile time. Syntax errors, while useful for examples, must be flagged clearly so that the reader does not struggle trying to figure out the code!
• The last example in that section says that you can omit the var keyword, yet we clearly see the var keyword in the example code given. It is more clear to say that we can omit additional var keywords when declaring multiple variables.

So, buyer beware.