Introduction

Welcome to our first chapter in iOS Programming Cookbook. We will start our journey in this book with a revision or emphasize on the most important and commonly used topics in Swift programming language. Before talking about these topics, ensure that you have a basic knowledge about Swift programming language and have used it before.

It has been more than 2 years since Apple released the awesome programming language-Swift. Swift is meant to be easy to code, easy to learn, safe, and intuitive. For each version of Swift, Apple introduces some awesome features and enhancements in the language. As we see in Swift 2.0, Swift came with higher performance, and new APIs such as error handling, and some enhancements. Swift is not meant to be available in iOS development only; you may find it in other platforms later in the future, thanks to the announcement of Apple that Swift will become open source.

Our recipes in this chapter will focus on the most important topics in Swift that will be used frequently in iOS development. When you focus on these topics and learn them properly, you will find using them in development will make your life easier and your code will be more organized. There are many people who can write code, but only few can write awesome code. Thus, mastering these topics is very important to be a good developer and to help you and others working on a project.

For the latest features of Swift, ensure that you are using the latest version of Xcode.