About this course

Paul Hudson @twostraws October 1st 2021

Updated for Xcode 15

I’ve been teaching folks to write Swift since 2014, the same year Swift launched, and at this point Hacking with Swift is the world’s largest site dedicated to teaching Swift.

Along the way I learned a huge amount about what topics matter the most, how to structure topics into a smooth and consistent flow, and most importantly how to help learners remember topics they’ve learned. This course is the product of all that learning.

Unlike my previous work this does not strive to teach you every aspect of Swift, but instead it spends more time on the subset of features that matter the most – the ones you’ll use in every app you build, time and time again. Yes, there are some advanced language features covered, but I’ve cherrypicked them based on usefulness. When you’ve finished the book you might want to carry on learning some of the more advanced features, but I suspect you’d much rather get busy learning how to use SwiftUI.

Each chapter of this book is available as both text and video, but they cover exactly the same material so you’re welcome to learn whichever way suits you best. If you’re using the videos you’ll notice that I sometimes introduce topics using slides and sometimes demonstrate them in Xcode. It might feel repetitive, but it’s intentional – there’s a lot of things to learn, and if you saw each one only once it just wouldn’t stay in your memory!

There’s one last thing: you might notice how many chapters start with “How to…”, and that’s intentional – this book is here to show you how to do things in a hands-on way, as opposed to delving into theory. Theory is important, and you’ll come across a lot of it as you can continue to learn, but here the focus is relentlessly practical because I believe the best way to learn something new is to try it yourself.

Programming is an art: don't spend all your time sharpening your pencil when you should be drawing.