Learn Swift Programming Syntax (Udacity)

Why Take This Course

• A quick and fun introduction to Swift basics.
• Practice with Playground exercises
• Thorough explanations of Swift's less-intuitive features like Optionals and Closure Expressions.

What You Will Learn

Lesson 1
Swift Basics

• An introduction to Swift types and operators.
• Develop deftness in defining variables and constants.
• Practice what you've learned with exercises in Swift playgrounds.

Lesson 2
Optional Types

• Declare explicitly and implicitly unwrapped optionals.
• Unwrap optionals using both optional binding and optional chaining.
• Practice safely unwrapping optionals and learn to avoid errors.

Lesson 3
Swift Collections

• Learn about the Swift Collection Types: Dictionaries
• Arrays and Sets.
• Perform basic operations including: append

count
insert
remove
update
find
and retrieve.

• Practice manipulating collections with exercises in Swift playgrounds.

Lesson 4
Control Flow: Loops, If statements, and Switches

• Practice fast iteration with for-in loops by iterating through items in Arrays and Dictionaries.
• Create programming logic of increasing complexity with if-else statements.
• Delight in the convenience and conciseness of Swift switch statements.

Lesson 5
How to Write and Call Functions in Swift

• Define and call functions.
• Correctly use local and external parameters.
• Identify parameter types and return types.

Lesson 6
Classes, Properties, and Methods

• Practice building custom classes with their own properties and methods.
• Learn about type properties and computed properties.
• See example use cases for type methods and instance methods.

Lesson 7
Enums and Structs

• Learn the difference between value types and references types.
• Practice choosing when to use enums structs and classes.
• Use enums to make your switch statements extra Swifty.

Lesson 8
Protocols and Extensions

• Learn how protocols and extensions can help keep your code DRY.
• Given a series of code snippets fix compiler errors by implementing protocols.
• Edit the code in a sample app to see extensions in action.

Lesson 9
Closure Expressions

• Practice using Swift closures with the functions sorted() and filter().
• Learn shorthand closure expression syntax to make your closures super concise.

Prerequisites and Requirements
This course assumes prior programming experience! Specifically, you should be familiar with programming concepts like variables, if statements, and loops, as well as object-oriented concepts like methods and classes. You will also need access to a Mac computer running OS X 10.10 or later.