A Swift Introduction to Swift
David Mark, Jack Nutting, Kim Topley, Fredrik K. Olsson, Jeff LaMarche · Apress eBooks · 2014
Until recently, writing an iPhone or iPad application meant working with Objective-C. Because of its unusual (some would say elegant) syntax, Objective-C is one of the more polarizing programming languages—you either love it or you hate it. At the World Wide Developer Conference in 2014, Apple changed all that by unveiling an alternative—a new language called Swift. Swift’s syntax is designed to be more recognizable to programmers who are used to more popular object-oriented programming languages like C++ and Java, therefore making it easier to start writing applications for iOS (and for Macs, since Swift is also fully supported as a development language on OS X). This appendix covers the parts of Swift that you’ll need to know in order to understand the example code in this book. We assume that you already have some programming experience and that you know what variables, functions, methods, and class are. This appendix is neither a reference nor an exhaustive guide to the language—for that, there are numerous other resources, some of which are listed in Chapter 1. With that understanding, let’s get started right away! These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.