Beginning Swift Programming

INTRODUCTION

The IT world is an extremely fast-changing one. Small changes occur nearly daily, and every now and then something big happens that changes the entire industry, if not the world. For example, the iPhone, introduced in 2007, transformed the mobile industry overnight, spearheading the new era of the smartphones. The launch of the iPad three years later (2010) changed the way we use our computers, causing many to predict that we are all entering the end of the PC era.

For a long time after its inception in the 1980s, Objective-C was used by NeXT for its NeXTStEP operating system. Mac OS X and iOS both derived from NeXTSTEP, and Objective-C was thus the natural choice of language to use for Mac OS and iOS development. Developers starting on iOS development often complain that Objective-C does not look like a modern programming language (such as Java or C#), and that it is difficult to write and requires spending significant amounts of time trying to learn. For seven years, Apple has improved on the language and the iOS framework, making life easier for developers by introducing helpful features, such as Automatic Reference Counting (ARC), which takes the drudgery out of memory management, and Storyboard, which simplifies the flow of your application user interface. However, this did not stop all the complaints. Furthermore, Apple needed a new language that could take iOS and Mac OS development to the next level.

In 2014, at the Apple World Wide Developers Conference ...