[swift-users] Learn Objective-C First? and Low Level Understanding of computer

[Jens Alfke]

> On Jul 30, 2016, at 10:36 AM, smd via swift-users <swift-users at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> I’m interested in learning Swift. Is there a need or benefit to learn Objective-C first?

At this point I don’t think you need to know Obj-C, but it can help to at least be able to read/skim it, since if you look online for help or for sample code with Mac programming, the majority of it’s still going to be in Obj-C. But that’s fairly easy — a lot of it is just knowing how to translate some syntax. For example, Objective-C “[x doSomething: y]” generally becomes “x.doSomething(y)” in Swift.

> I’ve done some C, C++, VB 6.0, and VBA / Access in the past but I’m definitely not a programmer.

I’d recommend starting by learning fundamentals, instead of jumping into building an app. Fortunately Xcode’s Playgrounds are a good way to do that, since you can build things like data structures or algorithms interactively. There are a lot of interesting and challenging things you can build that don’t require a fancy GUI but will teach you a lot. For example, look up search trees and see if you can implement various types like binary trees, red/black trees or b-trees. Or implement your own Dictionary class with a hash table.

—Jens
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