It's aimed at developers (like me) who can already program in a language like Ruby or Python and are looking for a quick tour of Swift.
It's available to read for free online at http://books.aidanf.net/learn-swift
I'll be adding stuff about yesterdays announcements in the next couple of weeks.
You say modern but I don't think it's really what you mean here.
Your descriptions of Ruby vs Obj-C make it seem that really what you mean is high-level; that is, to a newer programmer, easier.
These languages (Haskell excepted) make it very easy to do simple things. Describing them as "modern" in contrast with the implicitly antiquated Obj-C makes it a little hard to take your assertions seriously.
Verbosity is a claim to make, age is not.
http://www.objc.io/books/fpinswift/
No affiliation to the author/book.
I did find the first few examples with the REPL to be a bit confusing. Were you using a function before it was defined?
$ swift Welcome to Swift! Type :help for assistance. 1> 3.14 * 2.5 * 2.5 $R0: Double = 19.625 2> println("The area of the circle is \($R0)") The area of the circle is 19.625 3> 4> $R0 * 2 $R1: Double = 39.25 5> println("And double that is \($R1)") And double that is 39.25 6>
What's Double? Trying to follow this (which didn't make sense to me because I didn't know the history stuff was there) simply caused error messages.
I have recently started programming on iOS with swift. I got my head around the language just not any of the frameworks, specifically UIKit.
Also, Udacity has some iOS courses using Swift now as well. Here is the intro one: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-ios-app-development-...
The Apple docs, at least last time I tried reading through them, were like wading through treacle so this is a great alternative! I just read the first couple of chapters in 10 minutes and got all the key info I wanted with no fluff - great job!
One edit suggestion - I've noticed a couple of times so far that "it's" is used incorrectly, for example in this sentence:
> You can’t change the type of a variable once you’ve declared it. It’s type is fixed at the time it is declared.
I assume you know the error here but on the off chance you don't:
it's = it is (it's a Bool) / its = the possessive of it (Bool is its type)
It's a little jarring so you might want to go through and fix these.
Cheers for the book! :-)
It turns out that it's really difficult to proof-read large blocks of text that you've written yourself :/ When your brain sees something it recognises it tends to speed up and skip over bits, seeing what it wants to see, thus missing stuff like this.
For learning a programming language I actually prefer the web format to the ebook. Now I've figured out how useful this book will be by reading a few chapters, I'll certainly purchase a copy anyway, $12 is more than reasonable for the value this provides!
But yeah, go with Swift, it's closer to Java than Objective-C is.
[1] https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/...
For comparison, the Apple book "The Swift Programming Language" comes in at 334 pages. "Learn Swift" comes in at 128 pages.
