Chapter 2
Starting with Swift

Playgrounds let us play around with iOS development, but it’s not really obvious what we can do with them yet. When we browse the documentation, we can see there are thousands of classes and tens of thousands of methods and functions we can call. But how do we do that? It kind of feels like we opened up the box for a model kit and we now have a thousand plastic pieces to put together but no instructions and no glue.

In this chapter, we’re going to start learning the Swift programming language, which will let us create our applications by giving us a way to call into the iOS SDK, and a way to compose our app’s internal logic. We’ll spend the entire chapter in playground mode, which will allow us to try things out, see what does and doesn’t work, and quickly learn from our mistakes.