Swift For Dummies

Introduction

In June of 2014, one of the highlights of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) was the announcement — a surprise to many attendees, including the multitudes of developers watching the videos around the world — of the development of a new language aimed at developers to use with iOS and OS X devices. Called Swift, it was presented as the language of the future for Apple’s developers, but it was made very clear that it would cooperate with the existing basic development language — Objective-C. (In describing the ways Swift and Objective-C would interact, Apple repeatedly used the phrase “mix and match” — not only in the presentations at WWDC, but in other venues as well.)

Think about that date— Swift has only been around since June 2014: We’re all beginners with Swift.

About This Book

Swift For Dummies is a beginner’s introduction to Apple’s new programming language. The book gets you started developing with Swift. You’ll quickly see how to create projects in Swift from the built-in templates that are part of the Xcode development tool. From there, you delve into the features of the language, from the basic to the advanced. Some of these features are unique to Swift whereas other, possibly more familiar features were inherited from other programming languages.

Before we get started with Swift, consider these two points:

• Apple has done this before, and they know how to do it. On both the hardware and software sides, Apple has successfully managed transitions ...