I've always found it odd how they proactively delete previous editions of the EPUB book from the server.

https://www.swift.org/documentation/#the-swift-programming-l...

For example, the currently offered EPUB book corresponds to the upcoming Swift 5.7 and has a "Beta" watermark on it. You think to yourself, I don't want to deal with beta stuff, and so edit the download link to "…Swift56.epub" instead of "…Swift57.epub". Nope - file not found! Beta book or nothing.

Apple does this with their developer videos as well. Very few videos from before WWDC2015 are available (some from 2014 are, but not all of theme). I think they might still be on the server if you have the right URL, but otherwise they are inaccessible. It’s a shame because a lot of the information is still valid, even if the example code is in Obj-C. For example Apple demoed how to implement very cool, very custom CollectionView and UIKit Dynamics behaviors in some of those older videos and now it’s just gone.

Edit: And they no longer update their documentation archive. At least it’s still available, there are a lot of very in-depth programming guides in there with information that is still 100% valid but not available on the normal documentation website.

Microsoft has also removed a lot of older reference material on things like ActiveX.

Not complete, not official, but possibly useful: https://youtube.com/channel/UCOYNV2EifmBprMdSESVEu9g/videos

That's strange because my Books app still shows Swift 5.6. Are you on a beta version of macOS?

OP is talking about the Website.

I wonder why this was not the case since the beginning.

Open sourcing parts that in other languages have always been open source (Rust) is still something to praise but not a world shattering event.

> but not a world shattering event.

I don’t think anyone involved in the process would claim that it is. But as you alluded to, it’s still positive. And the type of news which fits well on HN.

Swift being open source makes sense that the book is too. Hopefully more and better examples will be added.

Is there an easy way to generate a pdf? EPub doesn't print well, and sometimes the eyes cannot take a screen.

Calibre will convert it to PDF for you. Might be overkill.

Great. Now do the same for API docs.