Well…Just completed the first tutorials for this book. The tutorial is not bad. I still love it. However, there are a few things that I would like to point out and hopefully they would be adjusted for the next update. The autolayout is not well explained. I know that it would be used again in other tutorials in the rest of the book. I have not finished the other three tutorials so I am not really sure. But the reason I am saying that is because there is an exercise challenge at the end of the tutorials for fixing the warning that Xcode emitted from the very first beginning when we just started, which is the autolayout. If you are a complete beginner, this will be a mystery to you.
The second part is the animation thing, which is the crossfade effect. I hope that tiny bit of code could be explained as well. Especially how and why the code works such as what part of the app that triggers the animation. The last line of code “view.layer.add(transition, forKey: nil)”, where does that view come from? why is it that adding the transition to the layer of the view make the crossfade effect work for the slider and the score and round labels?
I have looked it up a bit and found that the view is actually the UIViewController.
The authors are very knowledgeable but like I said in other posts, since it is a beginner book, and I hope the authors could assume that, not try to be offensive to other learners, the readers or the target audience were stupid so just go full length to explain everything in details.
With respect to AutoLayout, I understand very well that it is a very important topic, and I apologize if you found this chapter lacking. This is why we have taken the time to focus purely on Auto Layout by producing two video courses, and with more resources coming down the pipeline
As for the view, the view is not the ViewController itself, but rather the main/parent view contained inside the ViewController. The view is the UI element, whereas the ViewController is the class that manages the UI. I hope you understand the distinction here.
I do understand your frustration with some books perhaps assuming too much from the readers, and trust me when I say this, I know how you feel. I spent countless amounts of money buying books for years hoping to increase my knowledge in software development, only to discover that I would be stuck on a particular chapter because the author of the book assumed I knew how to get that point, or do some preliminary work which I had no idea about. Because each book usually has multiple authors, and each author has their own unique style of writing, it can be frustrating to some readers who may not “click” with that particular author. Having said that, the good news is that this is precisely why these forums are here: for you to ask any questions that remain unclear, and also to convey your thoughts so that we can make future improvements
I hope this helps, and thanks again for the feedback!
