Swift is relatively new programming language and is welcomed by the community of Apple developers with arms wide open. It’s not even a year and many developers have already made a switch to the Swift programming language. Apple developers are embracing Swift for the shear reason that it is much advanced, safer, easier, faster, and comes packed with all the features required for modern age apps development.
Swift without doubt is the future of creating OS X, iOS, watchOS and TVOS apps. It brings the best of both C and Objective-C and is supported by Cocoa and Cocoa touch frameworks. Developers across the globe have started sharing their expertise with the world for developing kickass iOS apps and games using Swift language.
Some of the swift tutorials covered here provide step by step instructions to build clones of games like Tetris, Flappy bird and 2048 to name a few. Let us look at some of the best Tutorials and resources out there in the wild, written by Swift experts, for creating iOS OS X and watchOS apps of all sizes and complexity.
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We will cover Swift introductory tutorials for beginners, intermediate level Swift tutorials and also the tutorials that teach how to build the most advanced Swift apps. If you already understand the basics of Swift then jump straight to tutorials for building games like flappy bird or apps like Facebook album browser, in Swift.
If you are absolute novice, then i would recommend you to start with Swift Programming language book from apple or Swift tutorial basics from tutorialspoint.com, listed towards the end of this article.
1. Building your first iOS game – Swiftiris
If you believe in learning by doing then this is the tutorial for you. It is written by Stan Idesis on Bloc.io. and is one of the best swift tutorials you will find online, for free. It is well organized and takes a step by step approach to teach you build a 2D puzzle game with Swift and Sprite kit.
You would end up learning swift as well as creating a fully functional 2D puzzle game of your own, the game is more like a clone of old school Tetris game with noticeable variations.
The tutorial comes in the form of an online book and you need to register to get access.
Go ahead and build your first game with Swift, right here – swiftris-build-your-first-ios-game-with-swift.
2. Crashy Plane with Swift – A Game like Flappy Bird
Here is another tutorial to learn swift and spritekit by building clone of one of the most popular mobile game of all times, Flappy bird. You would specifically learn about GameplayKit, SKAudioNode, guard keyword and the randomization.
Tutorial starts off by explaining on how to setup the environment and then moves on to setting up the player. You learn to setup parallax scrolling with SpriteKit. You create intro, game over and background music with SKAudioNode. Learn to use gamePLayKit for making random numbers and creating collisions.
In summary, tutorial touches upon most of the coding aspects and makes you learn how to build fully functional iOS game in Swift and spriteKit.
Recommended Course – Complete iOS Game Course Using SpriteKit And Swift.
You can grab this tutorial here at – Build Crashy plane game with swift.
3. 2048 Game Clone with Swift and Sprite Builder
In this tutorial, you build clone of the popular 2048 mobile game using Swift. It is no rocket science but you learn the depths of programming language when you actually build a fully functional application.
It becomes all the more fun when learning involves a game and the folks at Makeschool are known best for writing tutorials that keep you fully involved. You start with just basic knowledge and come out making advanced games.
You can head straight to the tutorial here at Makeschool – 2048-with-spritebuilder-and-swift.
4. Tip Calculator App with Swift 2 and XCode 7.0
In this swift 2 tutorial you make a simple GUI based tip calculate application in xcode 7.0. This tutorial is written by Ray Wenderlich and is in continuation to the part-1 of Swift 2 tutorial where basics of swift 2 were covered.
This is one of the well written tutorials and a must for beginners as well as intermediate level iOS developers. In this tutorial, you would setup the project in Xcode, create storyboard, get familiarity with interface builder, and define the model, views and views controller.
Here is the link to this cool Swift tutorial – swift-2-tutorial-part-2-a-simple-ios-app.
5. iOS & Swift Tutorial: Multipeer Connectivity
This is a crisp and to the point tutorial written by Ralf Elbert, meant for advanced level iOS developers and requires practical knowledge of swift programming language.
You learn about the Multipeer connectivity framework that is used for connecting nearby iOS devices. With Multipeer connectivity, Apps on different nearby devices can communicate with each other using Wifi (same connection), peer-to-peer wifi or Bluetooth.
Here you go with the link to this iOS multipeer connectivity tutorial – ios-swift-multipeer-connectivity.
6. Swift tutorial with iBeacons – Beginners guide
iBeacons technology extends the location services of iOS and alerts your apps when your device comes in range of an iBeacon. This is quite an interesting space and here is a tutorial written by Nermic Sehic on cityOS.io to get you going with iBeacons.
You learn about Bluetooth LE (Low energy) and code an application in Swift programming language to detect all the iBeacons (hardware) in range of your device.
Grab this tutorial here at cityos.io – Swift-tutorial-with-iBeacons-Beginners-guide.
7. Location Tracking and Streaming with Swift
Tutorials that cover real life applications are the ones that help us understand depths of application development in any programming language. This is another good tutorial from pubnub.com that provides data streaming services, written by Norvan Sahiner.
In this tutorial, you build a real time application that tracks current location of the user and streams that location to the live updating map using pubNub data streaming services. Learning this technology equips you to write applications in navigation, fleet management and transportation etc.
Here is the link to this tutorial at pubnub.com – location-tracking-and-streaming-w-swift-programming-language.
8. TVOS – Building Top Shelf in Swift
Did we forget tvOS tutorials completely? Here is the one from Brian who loves making apps for anything apple. This tutorial is about making a top shelf app for apple TV.
The top shelf is the horizontal area above the first row of apps in Apple TV home screen. The app users can decide what apps get listed in this area and if an app is in focus then more details related to that app are displayed.
This is an Interesting app to learn swift and understand how to build TVOS apps by extending existing tvos app.
Here is the link to build your first TVOS App with Swift – tvos-tutorial-top-shelf.
9. Simple Signup and Login App with Swift and Parse
In this tutorial you create a Swift project by utilizing a third party cloud service, called parse. The small app that you create here contains login screen, signup screen, rest password and logout screens.
I strongly believe that exploring different technologies and services expands your horizon and takes you to the next level of app development expertise. This tutorial is a small step towards that where you learn to store and retrieve user credentials in the cloud storage of parse and connect parse services to iOS apps.
Grab this Swift tutorial here at appcoda – login-signup-parse-swift.
10. Menu Bar App with Swift – Video tutorial
Want to build and app accessible directly from the menu bar, here is the video swift tutorial that guides you to build one. The Xcode version 6.1 is used and the app is for OS SDK 10 and later. This one is a very crisp and clear swift tutorial for those who love to learn watching videos.
Here is the link to this Swift video tutorial – creating-menubar-apps-osx.
11. Facebook share button and twitter tweet button with Swift
This one is a very small tutorial and is not meant to learn the language depths but covers a very specific aspect of coding in swift, social framework. You create a single view application that has two buttons one each for sharing content on Facebook and twitter.
This tutorial is written by Valsamis on Codementor, you can go through the detailed tutorial by following the link here – ios-development-facebook-twitter-sharing.
For a step by step learning covering all aspects of Swift, you can follow below tutorials, these are absolute must for beginners –
12. The Swift Programming Language – Free Book
If you are absolutely new to the swift programming language then the best place to start your swift learning journey is to follow the official book released by Apple. The name of the book is “The Swift Programming Language – Swift 2 Edition”. It is available free of cost on iTunes.
The book covers below topics – • Language introduction • Deep diving into all features of Swift • Swift API reference
13. Swift Tutorial – Basics
This is a comprehensive swift tutorial intended for swift beginners from the house of tutorialspoint.com. The best thing about the documentation on tutorials point is that it is always updated with the latest versions of the language and can be used as a starting point for your swift learning journey.
TutorialsPoint also has the Try It option for all its tutorials. You can run the code snippets used in the tutorials right in the browser and play around with the code to understand the depths of the language.
Here is the link to this tutorial – Swift basics.