What you should know

- Whenever I write a course, I need to begin with a couple of assumptions about you, dear viewer. I try not to have too many, but here's the two I'm going with. That a, you know your way around a Mac, and b, you have some programming experience. That's it. You may or may not know Objective-C, you may not have done any Mac or iPhone programming before, that's fine, but I do expect you can write code. To make the most of our time, this course is about Swift. It's not a beginner's guide to programming. So at a minimum, you should already be comfortable with the fundamentals.

Variables, loops, conditions, functions, the core concepts found in all programming languages, and know at least the basic principles of object oriented programming. Terms like class versus object, inheritance, methods, and properties. Now if you haven't programmed at all, this isn't the place to start. Take a look at my foundations of programming fundamentals course here at lynda.com. If you've worked with Objective-C, I will point out some differences worth knowing, but that isn't the focus of this course. And I don't assume anyone is an Objective-C expert.

I will say it's going to be helpful if you have at least a passing familiarity with any C-style language. Whether that's C, Java, JavaScript, C Sharp, C++, PHP, ActionScript, etcetera etcetera. You don't have to be an expert, I just hope you don't run screaming from the room if you see a pair of curly braces in your code. You see, as a new language, Swift doesn't try to be different just for the sake of being different. It openly takes ideas and syntax from the most popular languages of recent years like C Sharp, Python, Ruby, Rust, and even Objective-C, so it has a syntax that's intentionally designed to be kind of familiar.

Yet it's able to add modern features that were never part of Objective-C. However, one word of warning about this. Because Swift is going to feel familiar and readable to programmers from many different backgrounds, certainly much more readable than anybody ever found when beginning Objective-C, it can be tempting to assume a little too much about that familiarity. Let me tell you what I mean with one example. As we'll see in a moment, Swift uses the keyword var, v a r, when defining variables. And in the days after Swift was first announced, I would see blog posts and tweets that would say something along these lines, "Swift uses var, well JavaScript uses var, "so Swift is like JavaScript." Well, no, it really isn't.

And if you try and write Swift as if you're writing JavaScript you're going to have a bad time. Now this is of course true when comparing Swift to any other language. We want to enjoy the similarities when we find them, but just because you find three things in Swift that seem almost identical to your current language, doesn't mean the next three things will be. So, whatever language you know, try to leave most of the specifics behind and just bring the core concepts and ideas of programming with you.

Дата добавления: 2015-08-20