Swift Programming: The Big Nerd Ranch Guide (Big Nerd Ranch Guides) 2nd Edition

This is a great book, but it requires a lot of time and dedication. I learned Java in college and then I learned objective C. I found the transition of going from Java to Objective C to be pretty easy. The transition to Swift on the other hand was a different story. It's very different than other types of popular languages. The one thing that this book taught me is that Swift can be very easy and straight forward, but at times can become very difficult to use and understand. Swift is a new language so if you're coming from a background of Java or Objective C, then expect to see a lot of things that you've never seen before. The worst chapter in this book was protocols. They made that chapter more complicated than it needed to be. I recommend that you read the swift documentation on strings which is online (google "swift strings documentation") and watch a youtube tutorial video on protocols first before attempting to read that chapter. Besides that, the rest of the book was really good so I gave it 5 stars.

I had to buy pair this book with the IOS programming versions for a college class. I actually enjoy reading these, and the chapters are very well broken down. I read roughly 3 chapters each a day and completed the challenges at the end of the chapters which took about 15 minutes total. These books are easy to understand and are straight to the point. I wish J had this type of book for all of my classes in college. Well done!

This is one of the best programming books since the O'Reilly Perl book by Larry Wall. If you are just learning to program you'll find this book to be challenging but accessible. If you're an experienced developer with a few languages in your toolkit, this is a great way to get up to speed in Swift, quickly. This book emphasizes the Swift language and doesn't spend a lot of time with Cocoa. This is a feature, not a bug. Cocoa is a whole 'nother layer of abstractions, and getting to know the Swift language first is a great idea for new programmers and makes the book more focused.

I used this book to get up to speed with Swift in order to start building a hobby app for iOS.THE GOOD. This is not a super long book. It is pretty readable and has tons of examples. If you want to gain a reasonable knowledge of Swift in order to get going, this is a great book to do so (it goes without saying that programming iOS apps requires significantly more knowledge beyond just the language, so reading just this book will not make you an app developer).This book also has a pretty broad coverage, going from basics to fairly advanced topics like protocol extensions and interfacing with Objective-C.THE BAD. I think the authors aimed at a very broad audience with this book - from novice programmers to experienced ones. I found the long-winded explanations of rather elementary concepts (OOP, data structures, etc) rather boring. Given the breadth (and relative depth) of material, I don't think this book would be an ideal first book for an aspiring future programmer. Given that, those gentle intros are really wasted on experienced developers (like myself). I also didn't find more depth where I would appreciate it (like discussion around clearly redundant language features - guard/if case/if let, class vars/static vars, computed properties/get accessors - it would be great to have some discussion about the reason for such perceived redundancy and guidelines on using the right tool).This brings me to another issue I have with the style. Every feature is explained starting with an elementary example and then generally describing it in a more generic way. Personally, I would prefer a concise description of the feature before demonstrating it by an example - I find it easier to understand the feature this way rather then trying to decipher what it would be by going through the example first. But that might be a personal preference.Bottom line: shortcomings notwithstanding, the book delivered what it promised and it was pretty readable at that. Unless a better choice emerges, definitely recommended as an overview of Swift.

I've been using the Treehouse website. And although that website is pretty good, this book it vastly better. It explains the concepts in more detail and makes it much easier to follow along and understand. It also has concepts than the treehouse website. Tree house isn't bad but this book is really really great. Anyone can learn swift with this book. However I would suggest buying the paper version and not the kindle version. I have both versions and it's so much easier to simply flick through the pages of the book than to try to do it in kindle.

There are a lot of new Swift books and authors, but this book has the backing of Big Nerd Ranch.If you're not familiar with Big Nerd Ranch history, they have been involved in Cocoa (and before that AppKit) development and training for probably two decades. Their classes are legendary for the quality and what you bring away from them. This book is no different.I bought this primarily for my son (having experience) but I've read quite a bit and it is an excellent guide.

I've had this book for several months now, and it is very easy to read and understand. The book is a little more expensive than most, but it the best I have read so far. I have no regrets with this purchase. Even if you have no programming experience at all, this book will walk you through the whole way. From installing Xcode to building apps. Overall a great purchase.

One issue that annoys me is that sometimes it would be nice to see some text in the listing before the "..." are used. It is not always clear where exactly the text is to go in the listing. You get annoyed because you have to at that point just download the code to see what your entries should have been. This happen in Chapter 17, 19, and 20 to me. Not bad just a lot of code modification (and you have to download the code...but you are trying to follow in lockstep with what is being taught. A little frustrating. Excellent informative Book. Very good.