Swift Pathway

Start your path

Pathways are simple and easy-to-navigate collections of the videos, documentation, and resources you'll need to start building great apps and games.

The Swift programming language is approachable, safe, fast, and powerful. It’s also backed by an extensive open source community that has one goal — to make Swift the best general-purpose programming language in the world.

A Swift overview

Developed by Apple and announced at the Worldwide Developer Conference in 2014, Swift was designed to be a safe, approachable, high performance general purpose programming language. These goals are achieved through various features including Swift’s modern and expressive syntax, type-safety system, and interoperability with C, C++, and Objective-C code.

In 2015 Apple announced that Swift would be released under an open source license, allowing developers outside of Apple to contribute to the language’s growth and development. This announcement helped Swift grow and evolve in the coming years, and it quickly became the preferred language for developing for Apple platforms.

Collaboration between Apple and the open source community has also enabled Swift to expand beyond Apple, with added support for different tools and platforms. This expansion into more and more use cases promotes a growing community of diverse developers and contributors all solving different problems, which in turn benefits all Swift language users. Overall, Swift has become a powerful and flexible programming language that developers can use to create modern apps for Apple platforms and beyond.

Learn the basics

Now that you’ve covered a brief overview of Swift’s history and community, it’s time to take a look at the features of Swift. Although this pathway is focused on developing for Apple platforms, the foundations here apply to writing Swift code on any platform.

To get started with Swift on any platform, begin by reading A Swift Tour. This article provides an overview of the features and syntax of Swift, and acts as your introduction to “The Swift Programming Language". This guide is the definitive source of information on Swift and all of its features and is a great reference manual to carry with you as you continue on your learning journey. In this pathway there are callouts to specific chapters in the guide that are especially helpful to read when first approaching Swift.

• A Swift Tour: Explore the features and syntax of Swift
• The Swift programming language guide

To start, “The Basics” provides an overview of some familiar data and collection types and describes how Swift handles them. Understanding the key differences in how common variables are handled will set you on a path to write clear and efficient code. You’ll also uncover information on Swift’s type system and learn why type inference matters, and how type safety supports your development process from start to finish. The next two sections provide more context on strings, characters, and collection types, and offer practical examples of how these data types behave in Swift.

• The Basics
• Type Safety and Type Inference
• Strings and Characters
• Collection Types

Next, begin to uncover some of the unique ways that you can manage control flow when developing with Swift. For example, pattern matching capabilities provide powerful and expressive ways to construct your code path, while Swift’s handling of optional types can reduce the risk of errors at runtime. Swift also provides a lightweight approach to error handling that integrates seamlessly with its control flow mechanisms. And once you begin to break down and organize your control flow you’ll discover some of the notable features of functions within Swift, and how they contribute to your code’s overall safety and performance.

• Control flow
• Functions

Structure your code

Understanding the building blocks available to you when structuring your code and modeling your data is essential to ensuring your app's success. An organized codebase will improve readability, ensure consistency, allow for easier testing, and remove future frustrations for you and any collaborators.

To begin, read an overview of value and reference types to learn more about how these different types behave. Understanding these behaviors is crucial to picking the right models for each situation. Then, spend some time learning more about three fundamental constructs for organizing your data — Structures, classes, and enumerations (enums). Though all three are used to organize data, it’s important to grasp the differences in their behaviors and use cases to ensure the efficacy of your data model. You can also read Choosing between structures and classes to explore best practices and gain a better understanding for how and when to use a specific model.

• Value and reference types
• Structures and classes
• Choosing between structures and classes
• Enumerations

Go further

You’ve covered a lot — From uncovering how Swift handles common data types, to learning about unique control flow capabilities, and exploring helpful resources for modeling complex data structures. The concepts and skills you’ve learned lay a strong foundation for developing with Swift. Beyond these foundations, Swift has even more features that will help you make your codebase more flexible, manageable, and powerful. Explore some of Swift’s advanced features below, and find out what you can utilize to take your app to the next level.

Built for Swift

If you're looking to jump directly into designing and building apps for Apple platforms, we have multiple frameworks designed specifically to harness the power and safety of Swift. SwiftUI and SwiftData offer an even more approachable way to build stunning and powerful apps, all while writing far less code.

SwiftUI

With SwiftUI, you have everything you need to jump right into developing great apps for Apple platforms. The approachable declarative syntax allows you to write and understand code more easily, while live previews in Xcode empower you to iterate rapidly while you view your changes in real time. To get started, you can dive into the SwiftUI pathway and experience how quickly you can bring your ideas to life.

• SwiftUI pathway

SwiftData

SwiftData is Apple’s new framework for data modeling and management. Learn how you can utilize this framework to help you persist data in your app, and create a clear and efficient data model. You can also find resources on how to migrate your current app(s) to SwiftData, and tutorials to get started with data modeling.