Gettin’ Swifty

When I first started to learn how to code, it was through an iPad application called Swift Playground. For a visual person like me it was awesome. I will always remember the first level because it taught me one of the most important lessons when it comes to programming, “The app will not do anything you don’t tell it to.” It was also a great way to learn because as the levels became higher, I was challenged to think outside box and and figure out one of many solutions.Understanding conditionals and loops was strong foundation for passing each level. Eventually, the app started introducing instances by being able to control more than one character and even changing the maps landscape.

There are many great resources to learn how to write in Swift, a few of which are free in Apple’s “Books” app. The book I used was “App Development with Swift.” Each chapter came with a practice lesson (you might need xCode to practice the lessons) and a very short quiz. From what I’ve experienced, the syntax is very similar to Javascript when declaring variable and classes, and it also introduced structures which is similar to a class but they don’t support inheritance and is passed by value instead of by reference.

There are a bunch of cool things you can learn while using XCode. While trying to make an application that sells parking spots I learned about the Framework, Mapkit. For a quick peel here’s a link to the documentation https://developer.apple.com/documentation/mapkit/ . The user will need to grant permission for the app to use the location. In any case, this is just one of the many things I have yet to learn as journey continues.