The Beginner’s Guide – A Step-By-Step Approach to the Programming Language Swift

Have you heard about Swift ios?Do you wish to explore more about it? You have landed at the right place! This post will give you complete details of Swift ios and why developers most focus on it. Additionally, we will share the best platforms that will help beginners learn everything about iOS development, mobile app programming, and details on how you can use this amazing programming language.

What Does Swift Means?

Swift is a multi-paradigm, general purpose, and compiled programming language designed for iOS, tvOS, watchOS, OS X, and Linux development by Apple Inc. The language is a substitute for the Objective-C language that was suggested as the most popular language for building apps for ecosystem devices from Apple.

Swift is named after the Swift bird, which is one of the fastest flying animals in the kingdom. The language was developed as a faster substitute to Objective-C. In addition to speed, Swift also offers other benefits such as safety, ease of learning, interactive, needs less code, and more other things.

Let’s check Swift ios and Objective-C languages in detail to have a better understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of both of them.

Comparing Objective-C and Swift iOS

As compared to Objective-C language, Swift comes with simpler syntax. This makes it convenient for beginners or people coming from other programming languages. This language is a core of different languages Rust, Objective-C, Ruby, C#, Python, CLU, and Haskell. Hence, if you are a programmer coming from other platforms or languages, you will find some similar concepts in Swift.

Furthermore, Swift is quite easier to read and maintain as compared to Objective-C. In the latter language, you need to maintain two code files for each class you define – an implementation file with a.m extension and a header file with a.h extension. Sometimes, alterations made in one of the files affect the other. Hence, you need to ensure to keep the files in sync. Just like other languages, C#, Java, JavaScript, and more, Swift manages with a single file.

The syntax of Objective-C is quite verbose. It is somewhat different from other types of programming languages. If you come from another programming language, you will be able to comprehend the second piece of code with slight differences to how variables are announced in other programming languages. Even if you are a beginner, then it is quite easy to intimidate the codes.

Though Swift is a new programming language, its adoption and popularity are increasing faster as compared to any other language. Presently, it is one of the most popular languages to develop for Apple devices. Khan Academy, Lyft, Sky Guide, Yahoo Weather, Hipmunk, Strava, Linkedin, and Clear are some of the popular apps built with Swift. It is because Swift is an open source platform.

Presently, there is a compiler for it for Linux. It is a big setup from Objective-C that could be used on a Mac OS machine. The language was introduced under the Apache 2.0 license that means developers can use it even in commercial products.

It is still speculative and new, but rumor has it that Google might consider Swift a ‘first class’ language in Android development. So, this is good news for those who are using Swift for porting the app to Android that won’t need obtaining additional skills. Uber and Facebook are also apparently looking forward to Swift to create their central operations.

An advantage of Swift is that it can be used as a server-side as well as forward-facing language. It is a beneficial product for companies like Facebook, where servers and apps can speak to each other seamlessly and it offers the company a wider scope to write APIs for services.

Swift iOS is still evolving and it would be really interesting to see what it grows to be and how it will be used in the future. After its announcement, the developers from Apple have continued working on it, resulting in incremental versions. It is soon expected that Swift 3.0 version will be announced soon. The main aim of its introduction is to offer users portability. This means to make it more portable to other platforms.

No matter what the future have in hold for this language, its popularity and growth have increased lots of job demands. It is a good time to be and become a Swift developer.

Beginner’s Path to Learning Swift

You can learn Swift through multiple resources. Here we list some of the resources that would be useful to you.

• Apple Documentation – The best place to start with is the Swift website itself. The site will provide you with details about the language as well as keep you notified about the latest developments. Moreover, you can learn Swift from the free Swift book from Apple. You can download iBooks for offline reading or read it online.
• Apple hosts the World Wide Developer Conference each year, where it announces new changes and devices to their SDK. It holds different talks that teach developers the ways to implement the newly introduced technologies and libraries. Such videos are available at the WWDC website.
• You can get tutorials on iOS and Swift development from popular blogs like AppCoda, NSHipster, and Ray Wenderlich.
• Newsletters are great to keep up with the up-to-date news on Swift and to discover great tutorials and articles on iOS and Swift development. Swift Weekly, iOS Dev Weekly, and This Week in Swift are some of the great newsletters to follow.
• Moreover, you can find some premium and free courses online to learn about Swift.

What to Do Now?

Swift iOS is a new programming language that overcomes the limitations of the most popular language, Objective – C. Beginners can learn more about it through online courses, Swift website, blogs, newsletters, and other resources mentioned in this post. Also, if you wish to develop an app in Swift iOS but do not have much knowledge about it, then you can always contact the expert developers at AIS Technolabs.