Summary

We have covered some pretty advanced material here, on topics that are widely regarded as considerably more complex than most. Hopefully you are convinced that the Operation framework is a powerful yet reasonably straightforward tool to use. The recent changes to Swift serve to underpin the philosophy behind encapsulating thread-based code in objects that can be manipulated in an intuitive and consistent way.

In this chapter, you have learned the following:

• How to use the Operation framework to simplify concurrent programming
• How to use the Operation framework to manage asynchronous programming tasks
• How to create your own solutions by subclassing the Operation class
• The differences between multithreading and multiprocessing
• The relationships between operations, code blocks, and operation queues

In the next chapter, we will demystify debugging, and look at some advance debugging techniques and tools that are at our disposal, making coding a considerably more pleasant activity than it might...