The Zen of Swift
Updated for Xcode 14.2
Swift is a modern, powerful, brilliant programming language that you can use to build apps for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, Mac, and more. Although it’s not an easy language to learn compared to some others, it does allow you to build any app you can dream of while also being an extraordinary valuable skill for a future career if you wanted.
I’ve written many books about Swift that focus on the how of coding – how do you embed interactive maps in your user interfaces, how do you create custom graphics, and so on. This book is different, because it’s focusing on the why of Swift: it’s designed to explain why all the key language features are important and useful, so you can understand them in a practical context.
This book has partly been designed to accompany the variety of beginner courses I have produced, such as Swift in Sixty Seconds and the 100 Days of Swift and SwiftUI. Those courses are designed to give you practical experience building things with Swift, but when you’re just starting out you’ll find yourself asking questions like “I get that Swift has functions, but why does it have them?”
Well, this book is designed to answer them all. Yes, there will be some more code here, but always with the purpose of explaining to why a particular feature is useful in practical software development.
I’ve tried to make this book as accessible as possible, but that doesn’t mean I have oversimplified things. Instead, I’ve just tried to assume nothing about readers (so you can read any chapter of the book in whatever order you want), while also keeping my language and examples as clear and straightforward as possible.
Anyway, I hope this proves useful for you – Swift is so much fun to work with, and I hope that this book plus my practical hands-on tutorials can combine to help you achieve your goals with Swift faster than ever.
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