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by codemac 4295 days ago
My brother has been using swift to learn some programming.

I don't have a mac, let alone iTunes.

Is there a legal way for me to download/purchase a manual to help him with his progress?

7 comments

I posted this to HN the other day and people seemed to like it: http://www.runswiftlang.com/learn

It'll let you run Swift code from your browser. The Learn page gives you a short run down of some features as well (I'm in the middle of writing up content for it, what's there now is a placeholder really, just the basics) and links to more documentation from Apple.

https://developer.apple.com/swift/resources/ has lots of helpful info, including ebooks and videos.
THANK YOU

That's what I was looking for. Really appreciate it.

iOS/Xcode as a first programming environment is really odd and foreign to me, but my brother seemed excited about it, and I want to encourage him. He's really talented, he could be amazing as a software engineer if he ever wanted to be one.

Xcode is extra strange because it's so non Mac like. Drag with right mouse button to connect things, unintuitive icons with unhelpful hover text...
The language manual is free at apple.com
And it's quite a good manual at that. Starts with a high-level overview of language features in plain English, then provides a firehose of nitty-gritty.
And the official e-book is available in multiple formats (PDF, MOBI, ePUB) on http://swiftlang.eu
www.sososwift.com has been my go-to.

Beware, some of the vids are probably out-dated. It was my experience that every version of XCode6beta that came out broke my app with syntax or object-access type changes. I just downloaded XCode6GM and a bunch of stuff I was doing with "as NSArray" forced me to do "as? NSArray". And self.navigationController.navigationBar needed a "?" appended to controller, otherwise you'd get the very confusing build error saying something like "navigationController has no member called navigationBar".

Cool, that looks like a great resource.

And thanks for the code conversion tips :)

I don't know if Swift would be the best language to learn programming. Python is probably a better option. I would avoid platform specific languages until you are hired to work in that space. Open platforms like Python are much easier than close platforms to get started in Computer Science.

A good place to start with python would be the Introduction to Computer Science course on Udacity.

https://www.udacity.com/course/cs101

If you are interested in ML, I can recommend taking the Programming Languages course on Coursera after the python course.

https://www.coursera.org/course/proglang

The Programming Languages course on Coursera: highly recommended
If you mean learning Swift, check out www.LearnSwift.tips Disclosure: My Site
Neat, thanks for the link.

Also - tld of .tips? I need to register some funny names now

Lol ya it's one of the new ones. If you think that has potential check out all the new TLD's: http://newgtlds.icann.org/en/program-status/delegated-string...
Your brother should instead use a programming language with a cross-platform, free software implementation.