I’ve been tinkering with Swift, Apple’s new programming language, over the last few months. It’s a really neat programming language and probably isn’t that far off what ActionScript 4 would probably have become if it had ever seen the light of day. While Objective-C can look complicated and confusing, Swift is very easy to get up and running with. In fact, those from an ActionScript or JavaScript background will probably find programming in Swift to be great fun. I know I have.

For me, blogging is a great way of learning. I find writing tutorials to be a particularly good way of pushing myself. So two months back I set up a new blog named Yeah But Is It Swift? It’s a tutorial site aimed at those wanting to learn Swift. I don’t plan to post as frequently to it as I do with this blog. Instead I’m planning to post about six significantly sized tutorials over the next twelve months. Hopefully it’ll be a good resource for anyone who comes to this blog but wants to start dabbling in native iOS development.

The initial three or four tutorials that I’m writing are part of a guide that will get you up and running as quickly as possible. The first two of those tutorials are already live:

Part 1 covers the following:

  • How to work with playgrounds
  • The basics of the Swift programming language
  • Grouping multiple values into a tuple
  • How to work with optionals
  • String fundamentals
  • Control flow

While part 2 covers:

  • More detail regarding strings
  • How to work with arrays and dictionaries
  • Control flow with while loops and the switch statement
  • How to work with enumerations

I’m still undecided whether having a separate blog for these tutorials is a good idea or not. For the time being I’ll keep it separate but I may bring the articles directly into this one in the future. I’ll see how it goes. Anyway, let me know your thoughts and happy programming folks!