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Comment by victor106 | Hacker News Reader

How stable are swift releases now? What are some good resources to start learning swift?

I think, as a starting place, Apple's Swift Programming Guide is hard to beat

In my experience, it's difficult to go through because it's so comprehensive and thorough, and I guess it has to be because it has to assume the lowest common denominator audience. Personally I'd like a shorter guide that assumes you know a few languages (C#, ObjC, JS, Java) and skips a bunch of the tedium of how programming languages work in general and gets right to what's different about Swift. It may seem like it does that, but look at their page about control flow[1] and tell me it's not an unreasonably long-winded way of explaining switch, for, for-in, while, break, continue, and if.

[1]: https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Sw...

I agree but Swift is a new enough language that I'm not sure such a resource exists yet. When I learned Swift I just skimmed through the parts that weren't interesting and that worked for me. It was a good overview of the language.

As an aside, the book, Advanced Swift, by the objc folks is fantastic but assumes you already know Swift. It's not what you're looking for, but something to move onto after you grasp the basics.

Maybe there is room for a publisher that makes books for people that already know how to program?

1.x was rough every point release broke major stuff

2.x was stable all through, but a lot of work to migrate from 1.x

3.x minor changes but a big renaming effort leading to a lot of work in accepting proposed changes in Xcode. Laborious more than difficult

4.x most projects I've tested just compile. On the road to a stable ABI

For learning Swift, we made an interactive map of all the best resources :

https://learn-anything.xyz/programming/programming-languages...

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