I have attended iOS 5 course and skimmed through iOS 7 course, so I hope my comment would apply to this course as well (just looked at contents/chapters). I don't really recommended attending this class without programming experience and also one should be good, I mean with beginner experience also it will be difficult. I was beginner at programming and it was difficult. Lots of things didn't make sense and ultimately I gave up in middle. Now I have understood basics of programming paradigms, like loops, object oriented programming and other concepts like MVC, things started making sense. For me iOS8 class gonna be good experience, I hope. Plus swift is easy to understand syntax wise compared to Objective C, for me.

Note that I am still a noob at Objective C, however I have learnt bit of Python and things still make sense. Hope this helps you.

As Paul mentions in the video, you are expected to have object oriented programming knowledge. If you are new to programming, I think you'll get confused at some point on the reasoning behind why he is doing/teaching some of the things.

Perhaps start from a tutorial like [1] to learn the basics and also object oriented paradigms. Then, follow the Swift course.

[1] http://code.tutsplus.com/series/python-from-scratch--net-205...

I am pretty sure that in the Stanford CS curriculum, CS193P has pre-requisites that include introductory programming clases.

No, according to course material you're expected to be somewhat experienced in object oriented programming.