You must learn the Swift language. Swift is the recommended development language for iOS. The first two chapters of this book are designed to give you a working knowledge of Swift.

You must master the big ideas. These include things like delegation, archiving, and the proper use of view controllers. The big ideas take a few days to understand. When you reach the halfway point of this book, you will understand these big ideas.

You must master the frameworks. The eventual goal is to know how to use every method of every class in every framework in iOS. This is a project for a lifetime: There are hundreds of classes and thousands of methods available in iOS, and Apple adds more classes and methods with every release of iOS. In this book, you will be introduced to each of the subsystems that make up the iOS SDK, but you will not study each one deeply. Instead, our goal is to get you to the point where you can search and understand Apple’s reference documentation.