Chapter 1. Taking the First Steps with Swift

Ever since I was 12 years old and wrote my first program in the basic programming language, programming has been a passion for me. Even as programming became my career, it always remained more of a passion than a job, but over the past few years, that passion has waned. I was unsure why I was losing that passion. I attempted to recapture it with some of my side projects but nothing really brought back the excitement that I used to have. Then, something wonderful happened, Apple announced Swift. Swift is such an exciting and progressive language that it has brought a lot of that passion back and made programming fun for me again.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• What is Swift?
• What are some of the features of Swift?
• What are Playgrounds?
• How do you use Playgrounds?
• What are the basic syntaxes of the Swift language?