Introduction

A lot’s happened since June 2014, when Apple shocked the developer community by launching a new programming language called Swift. In 2015, another shock was in store when Apple made Swift open source, opening the doors for the developer community to get involved in its progress. In the years since, Swift evolved into the powerful, modern and expressive language it is today. According to the latest stackoverflow survey, Swift’s ranked the sixth most-loved programming language. And although Swift’s primarily used in iOS and Mac OS development, Swift isn’t limited to building iPhone apps and Mac programs—you’ll find it available in web development, server-side development and cloud-based services. Craig Federighi, Senior VP of Software Engineering at Apple, threw down the gauntlet in a podcast interview when he declared his hopes for Swift to become “ the language, the major language for the next twenty years of programming in our industry.”

It’s obviously a good time to explore Swift! This sampler brings together sample chapters on Swift from three books available through Manning Publications. First— we’ll look at an introduction to data types in Swift in a chapter from my own book, iOS Development with Swift.