Head First Swift

Chapter 2. Swift by Name: Swift by Nature

You already know the gist of Swift. But it’s time to dive into the building blocks in more detail. You’ve seen enough Swift to be dangerous, and it’s time to put it into practice. You’ll use Playgrounds to write some code, using statements, expressions, variables, and constants—the fundamental building blocks of Swift. In this chapter, you’ll build the foundation for your future Swift programming career. You’ll get to grips with Swift’s type system, and learn the basics of using strings to represent text. Let’s get going...and you can see for yourself how swiftly you can write Swift code.

Note

The puns will now stop.

Building from the blocks

Every program you write in Swift is composed of different elements. Through the chapters of this book, you’ll be learning what those elements are, and how to combine them to get Swift to do what you want it to do.

Bullet Points

• There are numerous elements that make up a Swift program. These are the building blocks.

• The most fundamental building blocks are expressions, statements, and declarations.

• A statement defines an action for your Swift program to take.

• An expression returns a result, which is a value of some sort.

• A declaration introduces a new name into your Swift program, for example ...