There's much more about the Swift programming language than we could fit here. Throughout the course of this book, we will throw in a few extra tidbits and nuances about Swift as it becomes relevant to our upcoming gaming programming needs.
If you wish to become more versed in the Swift programming language, Apple actually provides a wonderful tool in what's known as a Playground.
Playgrounds were introduced with the Swift programming language at WWDC14 in June of 2014 and allow us to test various code outputs and syntaxes without having to create a project, build it, and run it and repeat again, when in many cases we simply needed to tweak a few variables and function loop iterations.
There are a number of resources to check out on the official Swift developer page (https://developer.apple.com/swift/resources/).
Two highly recommended Playgrounds to check out are as follows:
- The Guided Tour Playground (https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/documentation/Swift/Conceptual/Swift_Programming_Language/GuidedTour.playground.zip): This Playground covers many of the topics we mentioned in this chapter and more, from Hello World all the way to Generics.
- The Balloons Playground (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/downloads/Balloons.zip): The Balloons Playground was the keynote Playgrounds demonstration from WWDC14 and shows off many of the features Playgrounds have to offer, particularly to make and test games.
Sometimes, the best way to learn a programming language is to test live code, and that's exactly what Playgrounds allow us to do.
In addition to testing snippets of code in our games, iOS 9 also allows us to plan and structure our games, which is the topic of the next chapter.