title: Swift Fundamentals: The Language of iOS Development
author:  Mark Lassoff 
description: Mark Lassoff 's parents frequently claim that Mark was born to be a programmer. In the mid-eighties when the neighborhood kids were outside playing kickball and throwing snowballs, Mark was hard at work on his Commodore 64 writing games in the BASIC programming language. Computers and programming continued to be a strong interest in college where Mark majored in communication and computer science. Upon completing his college career, Mark worked in the software and web development departments at several large corporations. In 2001, on a whim, while his contemporaries were conquering the dot-com world, Mark accepted a position training programmers in a technical training center in Austin, Texas. It was there he fell in love with teaching programming. Teaching programming has been Mark's passion for the last 10 years. Today Mark is a top technical trainer, traveling the country providing training for software and web developers. Mark's training clients include the Department of Defense, Lockheed Martin, Discover Card Services, and Kaiser Permaente. Mark's clients rate his classes 9.81/10, with consistent perfect scores on participant evaluations. In addition to traditional classroom training, Mark is a sought after video trainer and host. He has authored and hosted video courses for several publishers, including his own company LearnToProgram.tv, Inc.. Mark has authored over 15 online courses and works with students from all 50 states and over 47 countries. Over 100,000 people have learned programming skills from Mark's courses. He lives near Hartford, Connecticut in a 150 year old converted textile mill.
zlib_text: **Programming iOS 8**
  
   **Matt Neuburg**
  
   **Preface**
  
  > Aut lego vel scribo; doceo scrutorve sophian.
  
  > > — Sedulius Scottus
  
  On June 2, 2014, Apple’s WWDC keynote address ended with a shocking
  announcement: “We have a new programming language.” This was surprising in
  several ways:
  
    * Apple buried the lede (or, looking at it another way, they saved the biggest until last). 
    * Like the weather, everyone had long talked about the need for a new language to replace Objective-C, but no one believed Apple would ever actually _do_ anything about it. 
    * How on earth had Apple done all the groundwork needed to design, prepare, and implement a whole new programming language without the least rumor leaking out? 
  
  Having picked themselves up off the floor, developers immediately began to
  examine this new language — Swift — studying it, critiquing it, and deciding
  whether to adopt it. My own first move was to translate all my existing iOS
  apps into Swift; this was enough to convince me th