The Swift community has grown tremendously over the past four years, especially after Apple made Swift open source. The excellent Swift and iOS developers covered here teach topics you might have been afraid to approach such as Core Data, design patterns, best practices, and Auto Layout techniques. You’ll also gain exposure to higher level concepts such as testing, TDD (test-driven development), dependency injection, SOLID, MVVM (model-view-viewmodel), RxSwift, app architecture, and more.
This guide is for you if you have an app on the App Store, if you have a corporate iOS development job, or if you’re an indie developer. If you’re new to coding, you’ll want to start with the 15 beginner-friendly resources for iOS app development. If you’re an experienced developer, but you’re new to Swift, you’ll want to start with the Swift guide for experienced developers.
Each of these 10 developers is committed to the iOS development community and provides regular content that is timely and actionable. Bookmark their websites, or import them into your RSS reader, so that you can stay fresh.
Swift by Sundell
John Sundell created Swift by Sundell, a weekly publication of easy-to-digest articles on API design, testing, TDD, app architecture, Swift language features, design patterns, and developer best practices.
A leading voice in the iOS development community, Sundell is known for sharing design patterns you can use. You won’t find “foo” variables in his code snippets; instead, you’ll find practical examples placed in context and sparkling with insight.
You can listen to Sundell on the Swift by Sundell podcast, where he talks with talented developers in the Swift community.
Erica Sadun
Erica Sadun is an author and developer advocate you should follow. She blogs regularly on a wide range of topics relating to iOS and the Swift Evolution process. She is a leading advocate for changes to improve the usability of the Swift language.
If you want to learn how to create an accepted Swift Evolution proposal, you can follow the journey that Erica has gone through with failures, revisions, and successes.
Grab her books iOS Auto Layout Demystified and The Core iOS Developer’s Cookbook to level up your expertise.
NSScreenCast
NSScreenCast by Ben Scheirman is a fantastic weekly screencast on iOS and MacOS topics. There are more than 346 different tutorials you can use to learn about various Apple Developer technologies. Watch all of the NSScreenCast episodes on your iOS devices on the go, or at home on your Apple TV.
Scheirman has been creating weekly episodes for the last six years, during which he has covered many mainstream and obscure topics that help you improve your apps. Scheirman also creates excellent guides such as the Ultimate Guide to JSON Parsing with Swift 4 and NSDateFormatter.
Objc.io
Chris Eidhof, Daniel Eggert, and Florian Kugler started objc.io, which features a weekly video series on Swift programming and a number of books or in-depth guides. They also published 24 monthly “Issues” on advanced iOS and MacOS development (Objective-C). This collaborative magazine explores the nuances of views, view controllers, animation, and more.
Their books cover a number of advanced topics:
You can find Eidhof and Kugler on the weekly video series called Swift Talk (110 episodes) and on the Oblc blog. They do live coding tutorials on Swift programming topics such as debugging, refactoring massive view controllers, reducing coupling, and architectural best practices.
Cocoacasts
Cocoacasts is a weekly screencast on intermediate and advanced topics. When you make an app, you need more than fundamental programming knowledge. You need to know how to link all of the parts together in a coherent fashion, so that the app is maintainable into the future.
Bart Jacobs teaches you how to write testable code using dependency injection, how to avoid Auto Layout pitfalls, and how to persist data offline with Core Data. Cocoacasts has the most comprehensive materials on Core Data (90 lessons) you’ll find, along with Jacobs’ book on the subject, Mastering Core Data with Swift.
Realm Academy
Realm Academy is a collection of presentations from leading developers on iOS and MacOS. You’ll find recorded presentations with videos synced to slides, captions, transcripts, and key takeaways.
Discover third-party Apple Developers who are leading the engineering teams developing the most popular apps in the world. You can learn topics ranging from functional programming, MVVM, RxSwift, SwiftLint, and everything you ever wanted to know about collections.
Flight School
Flight School is Mattt Zmuda’s latest brainchild after working at Apple for the past three years. Flight School is a monthly technical book series using beautiful illustrations from Lauren Mendez.
Anyone familiar with NSHipster (below) will immediately feel at home with the Flight School guides, which share Zmuda’s characteristic clarity and depth. Get the new Flight School guides:
NSHipster
Before Flight School, Mattt Zmuda published weekly articles on NSHipster, where he discussed internals and little-known facts about the APIs. Now that his tenure at Apple has ended, he’s actively writing new articles and updating old articles to reflect changes in the latest versions of Swift.
Turn to NSHipster when you want to dig deep or look behind the curtain. One recent post, for example, offers an insider’s perspective into Bug Reporting at Apple. You’ll learn how to write good bugs and how to help the people on the other side of Apple’s radar bug reporting system.
(From my personal experience as a former Apple employee, it seems to me that Apple has been fixing bugs faster than ever. If you have a problem, don’t complain on Twitter—send Apple a bug report!)
ASCIIwwdc
Apple is still bad at search—searching the Apple Developer site is painful. The updates to the WWDC and Apple Developer Videos pages have improved over time, but they still lag behind ASCIIwwdc. ASCIIwwdc is the easiest way to search through all of the WWDC video transcripts for any keyword or technology.
If you need to learn a particular topic like AVFoundation, Auto Layout, or Accelerate, you can quickly find all of the related videos. Bookmark ASCIIwwdc for all of those times you’ll need to research and use a new API.
MikeAsh.com
Developers always have questions, and documentation never seems complete. Read Mike Ash’s Friday Q&A to find answers you won’t find anywhere else to advanced and even arcane questions about Objective-C and Swift. Ash explores system internals, performance tuning, thread safety, Swift weak references, and more.
In addition, Ash helps you level-up your Objective-C or Swift knowledge with The Complete Q&A books (volumes I, II, and III). You can use these volumes as reference materials to uncover lesser-known concepts or best practices. Follow Mike Ash on Twitter.
Learn Swift and iOS from the best
There has never been a better time to build apps using Swift. Thanks to Apple’s commitment to developers, and the benefits of open source software, Swift has evolved into a language that is delightful to use.
But it takes time to master a programming language, learn the APIs, understand the quirks, and get into a rhythm making iPhone and Mac apps. The tools, documentation, and Xcode continue to evolve, and the only way to keep up is to never stop learning.
By following these incredibly talented developers, you can be sure that you’re stretching your skillset and building on the shoulders of the Swift and iOS giants.
What do you want to learn next? Tweet me at PaulSolt on Twitter or email at Paul@SuperEasyApps.com. I’d love to hear about your progress and your ideas.