Hello and welcome to this course on swift coding for absolute beginners.
Now, how do you know if this course is actually for you?
Because you've probably looked at quite a few courses so far and wondered which is which and how do
I differentiate?
Well, first of all, I'm going to tell you that I was never a pro developer until about 10 years ago.
So I learnt probably at the same age as you are trying to learn.
So I understand what it's like to hear big words thrown around and not understand what any of them mean
and just feel generally a little bit lost.
What I try to do in this course is introduce programming concepts in Swift, but they apply to all languages
really in a way that you can understand quickly and easily.
So you can then build on that to build your own fully functioning apps without having to rely on courses
like this or people like me to hold your hand and show you what's going on.
So let's get on to the content of the course.
I've got a list of files here that I've prepared and are uploaded into the course.
We're going to start with the very basics and the basics consist of variables.
Variables are just little bits of information in memory.
There are a few caveats to that.
Of course, there are a few things we need to be aware of when it comes to variables, but I run you
through all of that throughout the course.
Now, it's worth noting that after each section there is a task and a bit of homework.
That's after every single lecture.
And that's the best way that you can learn how to code is to actually do it.
The tasks get progressively harder as we go through, but harder tasks make for stronger people.
Right?
So that's the variables.
Then we're going to look at type conversions and swift, which is a big source of terrible crashes and
errors in many, many apps.
And I'm going to show you how to neatly sidestep that using type conversions or not using them as a
good engineer should do.
Then we're going to look at tuples, I'll say no more about that.
But I will say something about options, options solve the no problem, the no problem is something
that's plagued many, many languages over the years.
And if you get a no reference exception in a program, don't worry about what that means.
It doesn't matter what program it is, the whole thing will crash.
OK, so we definitely do not want that because we get bad reviews.
I've had those, trust me.
We're going to look then at operators and swift and collections such as ARray's, which there are just
collections of variables.
And as always, with all of these, you get the source code.
You also get the homework and the solutions for those.
So what else are we going to do in this?
Well, let's look at some advanced swift code.
We are going to control flow in swift using for in loops.
And I'm going to show you a few tricks that perhaps you didn't know, even if you did know about for
loops before this, then we're going to look at conditional statements such as, if else, switch case.
These will control the some of the flow through your app and decide which path your code is going to
go down.
I'm also going to show you ways to use them that won't end up in spaghetti code.
So many beginners, when they first start out, have a bunch of code they write and it's really difficult
to track what's going on.
And when you come to change it six months later, forget about it.
You're not going to know what's what and you will start again.
So I'm going to show you how to avoid those problems.
And I'm going to look at control, transfer and functions.
Functions are a very basic element in programming functions or methods.
So I'll show you what those are all about here.
What have we got next here?
We've got nested functions.
Well, we'll discover that in the course we got enumerations.
Now, enumerations are so underused by people.
And I think it's because people don't teach them when they're beginners.
The enumerations are your friend.
They stop you from having, again, that spaghetti code that you don't need.
They also prevent you from having mistakes, the kinds of which I'll reveal in that section.
Then we're going to look at classes, how, when and why we should use classes and how they organize
things around our code.
And then there are two items I need you to do in classes.
Solution one, and solution to the tasks themselves aren't actually that difficult in this course.
But each task sometimes builds on previous items.
And there are one or two tasks where I really tax your brain because I want you to understand what's
going on here.
And the way I text your brain is I bring up previous subjects from a couple lectures ago and I get you
to integrate those in the tasks that you are about to do.
So all in all, this entire course is geared up to make you a top developer in Swift.
It doesn't matter if you're going to be using iOS, Mac iPad, Apple Watch, Apple TV, it doesn't matter.
This is the very foundation that you need in order to become a proper developer.
So if you're excited about starting the course, then let's begin.