Swift Kickstart Update
July 15, 2024
The Swift Language is now ten years old and with the release of Swift 6 it is both stable and complete enough.
I've updated my intro book, "A Swift Kickstart", for Swift 6 and Xcode 16. This will be the final update to the book (other than passes through to fix typos).
It was a good introduction when I wrote it ten years ago. I've updated it as the language evolved and released a second edition in March 2016 and have kept it updated as Swift changed.
The book, like the language, is both stable and complete enough.
"Daniel," you say, "what do you mean by 'complete enough'."
I mean that the things that will be added or modified in the future won't be items of interest to people who are first being introduced to the language. I can't imagine future changes to Swift that will need to be reflected in an introductory book.
A Swift Kickstart remains a fun, hands-on, fast-moving introduction to Swift for people who have programmed in some other language.
This update uses Xcode playgrounds to teach the language and is updated for Swift 6.
Although much of Swift 6 is centered around concurrency, I've decided not to add that to this book. I think you should get started with Swift without thinking about that and once you feel comfortable, I have a whole other book about Async coding in Swift (that I will also update soon).
If you own the book, this is a free update. As a celebration of this final update and Swift's 10th birthday, I'm releasing this update at 50% off on Gumroad.
Thank you,
Daniel