This is it, your whirlwind introduction to the world of programming! You’ll begin with an overview of computers and programming, and then say hello to Swift playgrounds, which are where you’ll spend your coding time for the rest of this book. You’ll learn some basics such as code comments, arithmetic operations, constants and variables. These are some of the fundamental building blocks of any language, and Swift is no different.

You’ll learn about handling different types, including strings that allow you to represent text. You’ll learn about converting between types, and you’ll also get an introduction to type inference, which makes your life as a programmer a lot simpler. You’ll learn about tuple types which allow you to group values of any type together.

You’ll learn how to make decisions and repeat tasks in your programs using syntax to control the flow. You’ll also learn about Booleans, which represent true and false values, and how you can use these to compare data.

Continuing the theme of code not running in a straight line, you’ll learn about another loop known as the `for` loop. You’ll also learn about switch statements that are particularly powerful in Swift.

Functions are the basic building blocks you use to structure your code in Swift. You’ll learn how to define functions to group your code into reusable units.

This chapter covers optionals, a special type in Swift that represents either a real value or the absence of a value. By the end of this chapter, you’ll know why you need optionals and how to use them safely.

Arrays are the most common collection type you’ll run into in Swift. Arrays are typed, as are regular variables and constants, and store multiple values like a single list.

Swift has an object you can use to break up code into reusable chunks: a closure. These are particularly important when dealing with collections.

Finally, you will revisit strings, which are bi-directional collections of Unicode characters.

This chapter introduces the first named type--structures. Structures are types that can store named properties and define actions and behaviors.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about stored and computed properties, along with some tricks, such as how to monitor changes in a property’s value and delay initialization of a stored property.

Methods are merely functions that reside in a structure. You’ll take a closer look at how methods and initializers help you build more complex structures.

Structures introduced you to your first named type, which lets you define your own named types. In this chapter, you’ll get acquainted with classes, which are much like structures.

This chapter introduces the finer points of classes and helps you understand how you can create, use and manage complex classes.

In this chapter you'll learn about enumerations, a type that groups related values. You’ll also finally discover what an optional is under the hood.

Protocols are a type that can bridge common behaviors between structs, classes, and enums by defining an interface or template for an actual concrete type.

In this chapter, you’ll learn what generics are, learn how to write your own generic code, and loop back and look at the generic types in Swift - dictionaries, arrays, and optionals - from this new perspective.

Swift gives you powerful tools for hiding complexity and organizing your code into easier to digest units. This chapter details how to do that.

You’ll learn how you can define your own operators and subscripts to make your types feel even more like built-in language constructs.

With pattern matching, you can accomplish more — with less typing. You’ll master all of its many forms in this chapter.

In the real world, you can’t avoid some errors. Gracefully handling errors is what sets apart mediocre code from great code.

You will learn about the type serialization system introduced in Swift 4 with particular emphasis on the JSON format.

This chapter digs into the details of Swift memory management examining the relationship between objects. It shows you how to avoid common leaks.

Value semantics have a clear advantage over reference semantics in terms of the local reasoning but can lead to inefficiency for large objects. This chapter shows you how to get the best of both worlds.

From the standard library to user authored generics, Swift is a protocol-based language. In this chapter, you’ll see how to get all of the benefits associated with object-oriented programming while being able to avoid most of the difficulties.

Learn how to use constraints to make generic code more useful and how to hide implementation details with opaque return types.