Beginner’s question on learning philosophy.

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Created 3d

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Hello Everyone! I started programming 6 months ago and started Swift / IOS last month. My learning so far has mainly been with Python. I learned a lot of the package ‘SQLAlchemy’, which has very ‘example based’ documentation. If I wanted to learn how to make a many to many relationship, there was a demonstration with code. But going into Swift and Apple packages, I notice most of the documentation is definitions of structures, modifiers, functions, etc. I wanted to make the equivalent of python ‘date times’ in my swift app. I found the section in the documentation “Foundation->Dates & Times”, but I couldn’t figure how to use that in my code.

I assume my goal should not be to memorize every Swift and apple functionality by memory to be an app developer. So I would appreciate advice on how to approach this aspect of learning programming.

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Answer 1

ssmith_c OP

8h

Well, welcome.

Most Apple documentation is a reference of API calls, generated from header files. It tells you how to spell them, what the parameters are, sometimes what those parameters mean, what OS versions you can use them in, and not much else. Learning from these resources is like trying to learn a natural language from a dictionary.

Apple has some videos from WWDC presentations about new technologies, but these tend to assume familiarity with the language and the problem domain.

In the olden days (maybe twenty years ago), I might have said "get a book", but books are out of date the moment they are written.

If you have access to an AI, I can recommend this approach. Prompt it with a program you have written in Python. Tell it that you are a Python programmer, and you are new to Swift, and that it should translate the program to Swift, and explain what it does and how the code compares to the Python implementation. Ask it to provide links to relevant documentation.

Then read the explanation it provides, follow the links, read those. Try out the code (remember, AI makes mistakes, confidently).

There are also a lot of good resources on the web. If you're stuck with how to use a particular API, search for "<api name> example". Pretty soon you'll identify some sites you will want to return to again and again.

Good luck!

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Answer 2

Claude31 OP

6h

Welcome to the forum.

I would advise you to learn and understand the basics, how it works and not look for already cooked solutions.

A good way is to use pathways: https://developer.apple.com/pathways/

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