Starting iOS Development Tips&Tricks

Videos are for showing. Doing is for learning.

I learned Swift a few months ago and learn by doing the following:

1. I started with Swift Playgrounds just playing the programming games.
2. Than I moved to following YouTube videos the created simple apps like Task Trackers. After each tutorial I would challenge myself by attempting from scratch reproducing what I just learned which really reinforced the concepts.
3. Finally I moved on to just using the documentation and reviewing the examples provided by Apple in the swift documentation. They are better than I expected and go into specific features very well.

Don't use the comments. People will miss your replies.

Honestly, the videos aren't very good. They're sometimes dated and wrong. Plus, they're exclusively focused on how to use Apple APIs. While those APIs are often challenging, they're the least important part of a great app. In many cases, they'll lead you down a dead-end path.

People spend so much time coding the APIs they forget to actually write code for the app to do something. Think of what you want to do. Even if it's a simple demo app for learning - a "hello world" app, think of the core functionality of the app.

Write a command-line version. Don't spend too much time on the I/O. It's just an exercise. Then write an app to do that. Add a little more. Repeat 10,000 times.

If you're just starting out, pretty much any API you learn at this point is wasted. By the time you're knowledgeable and skilled enough to make a decent app, all the APIs will be radically different by then. What you want to focus on is learning how to learn.