Thanks to Swift’s frequent improvements, even the experts are always learning. We asked a few friends to point us to the favorite resources they use to stay up to date and keep learning. Here are their recommended Swift blogs, articles, and talks!
Hope you enjoyed these as much as we did!
iOS Software Engineer at Intuit</div></div>For those of you still mostly in Objective-C land, I really enjoyed Greg Heo’s blog post about switching your brain to Swift. He offers a great breakdown of some of the key differences, and makes it easy to learn how to transition to a mixed code base for developers who don’t have the luxury of starting with brand new Swift-only code bases.
iOS Engineer, UX Artisan, API Craftsman at Labgoo & Wondermall
I’m currently playing with the approaches described in this talk by Square about one of the biggest pains in iOS community - software architecture. I spoke to the author Alan Fineberg who is currently working on a blog post that should dive into greater detail of the scheme described in the video. Other videos from Square engineering are quite interesting too!
Aside from that, I’m following a series of posts on the Artsy engineering blog regarding their architectural choices: the latest I read is about design patterns that they decided to avoid. I’m not going through them in chronological order, however all the posts from this series are equally great.
Creator of objc.io & Author of Advanced Swift</div></div>My favorite recent post is actually not a post but this Gist. It’s written by Mike Ash, who has been pushing the limits of Objective-C for a long time, and is doing exactly the same thing with Swift. He wrote an implementation of coroutines in Swift. The thing I love about it is that he built something that’s not straightforward, and hides all the implementation details behind a very simple interface.
Lead Mobile Developer at KhanAcademy
The new ReactiveCocoa introduction really shows off what abstractions are newly possible using Swift 2. This is perhaps the most advanced open-source Swift codebase, and it’s well worth studying.
Chief Codesplicer at codesplice
airspeedvelocity.net is a must-read resource for all aspiring Swift developers. He publishes exhaustive diffs on the Swift Standard Library each Xcode beta release, and the in-depth and well-researched discussion of things like Array
, Sliceable
and SequenceType
are worth thoroughly reviewing and digesting. Props also to the Monty Python reference!
Creator of Collectstor
I really like the course materials on Swift Education. I am still a beginner Swift developer and I really learn best through project learning methods. I think this is a good course for learning beginner Swift because each project introduces a different Cocoa Touch class which can be implemented into real-world applications.
Co-Founder of Lookback
I really, really enjoyed this article on Functional Programming from Mokacoding. It made me understand a lot of functional terms that I hadn’t understood before, and even re-evaluate the presentation recently gave at the Swift Language User Group in terms of “maybe I could express my Task stuff in a more functional manner?” Anyway, it explains concepts that people’ve tried to tell me for years, but I finally got it thanks to its nice drawings.
Addicted to Making Shiny Apps Like Parties for WWDC
I’m following the Swift category of Erica Sadun’s blog closely, especially for fast updates about new stuff in Swift releases. With every new beta that comes out I want to try all the new things, but usually I don’t have time to try all of them myself. Following other people like Erica helps me stay up to date with that.
iOS Developer at Propeller Labs
I found this article by Ole Begemann on extending the pattern matching system to be a good read. Using operator overloading with currying was probably the most fun part of it, but I definitely appreciate the syntax he is trying to achieve as well.
Realm Cocoa Team
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