Great Swift resources

August 31, 2014

Hey! This is an old post. It reflects my views and the state of the world in 2014, but is likely to be outdated. You’ll find me on Twitter, building Nozbe, and making engineering blueprints.

Witnessing the birth and growing up of a new programming language of any significance is a rare and very exciting opportunity. If you’re reading this, it’s probably because you too want to be a part of this — and I welcome you aboard!

But if you’re new here, you might find yourself confused. There’s not a lot of material out there on Swift and not too many people who know any of it.

I’ve been paying very close attention to the language and the community around it since day one and I’ve compiled a little list of Swift resources I found to be particularly useful. I hope it might be useful for you, too:

• The Swift Programming Language. It’s the most comprehensive guide of the language in existence. You want to start here. You also want to check out Using Swift with Cocoa and Objective-C which covers a lot (but IMHO not enough) about Swift’s interoperability with existing codebases in C and Objective-C. There are also iBooks versions of both guides, but I recommend the online versions, because the language is still in flux and so are the books. Speaking of which:
• SwiftInFlux. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a single place that listed all major changes to the language over the betas and things that were likely to change in the future? Well, SwiftInFlux is just that. The contributors, me included, collected all sorts of tidbits from Xcode release notes, Apple Developer Forums and developers’ blogs. It’s a good place to check out when a new Beta comes out. Or when you’re wondering if they’re likely to fix/add X in next releases.
• Swift Blog. I never thought Apple would make a blog, yet alone one maintained by real human beings. They did and it’s actually really good. You can learn a lot of tips and tricks about the language there, from the very people who made it.
• Airspeed Velocity. If you want to get hardcore with Swift’s standard library (all the stuff that’s not covered in the official guides), you gotta check out Airspeed Velocity. Also generics. Lots of generics.
• Alexandros Salazar and Russ Bishop like to take Swift and apply a more functional approach to it. If you’ve never programmed in a functional language and want to learn how to make good use of Swift’s immutable data structures, optionals, generics and custom operators — I think you’ll like these two.
• Efficient JSON in Swift with Functional Concepts and Generics. Speaking of functional programming in Swift, this single article was particularly inspiring and instructive to me. Just keep in mind that you need to read this piece very carefully — we’re talking some high level stuff here.
• David Owens does some interesting explorations of the language, for example how to handle error handling Swiftly, or — you guessed it — how to parse JSON in a functional manner.

That’s all I got for now. I’ll keep this page updated in the future as things evolve.

PS. Beginning this week, I’ll be posting about Swift regularly on this blog, so please subscribe if you want to hear more from me :)

Published August 31, 2014. Last updated October 05, 2015. Send feedback.