How Do I Learn Swift? A Clear Step-by-Step Path for Beginners
So you’ve decided to learn Swift — Apple’s powerful, beginner-friendly programming language that drives everything from iPhone apps to the latest visionOS experiences. But with so many tutorials, courses, and guides floating around online, where do you actually start?
The truth is: you need a structured path. One that starts with the basics, builds your confidence quickly, and then expands into professional-level training. Below is a simple, ordered plan that will take you from absolute beginner to ready-to-build apps.
Step 1. Begin on Reddit: r/Learn_Swift_Fast
Start your journey with something hands-on and fun. The community at r/Learn_Swift_Fast provides 20 free Xcode Playgrounds you can download right away.
Playgrounds are interactive coding files inside Apple’s Xcode IDE. Instead of passively reading tutorials, you’ll type, run, and see Swift in action. In just a few hours, you’ll begin to understand variables, functions, loops, and the other essentials that form Swift’s foundation.
This step gives you instant practice, with zero cost and no risk.
Step 2. Take the Introductory 3-Day Online Course at 3DaysOfSwift.com
Once you’ve had your first taste, it’s time to move fast. The 3-Day Swift Bootcamp is designed to teach you the entire Swift language in one focused weekend.
You’ll work through structured lessons, downloadable Xcode Playgrounds, and 72 hours of guided video tutorials. By the end of the course, you’ll have the knowledge to read, write, and understand Swift code with confidence.
This is your launchpad — it transforms you from curious beginner into someone with real programming ability.
Step 3. Subscribe to 3DaysOfSwift.com for Ongoing Practice
Learning any language — programming or spoken — requires practice and repetition. With the monthly subscriptionat 3DaysOfSwift.com, you’ll unlock more playgrounds, projects, and guided challenges.
Each lesson builds on what you learned in the bootcamp, keeping your skills fresh and pushing you further. Think of this as your Swift gym membership — consistent training that ensures you don’t just learn once, but actually retain and master Swift.
Step 4. Add User Interface Training
Once you’ve got the language under your belt, it’s time to learn how to build user interfaces (UIs). Swift alone gives you the power to program logic, but apps live and breathe through their design and interactivity.
You have two excellent options:
100 Days of SwiftUI by Hacking With Swift — a proven path to learn Apple’s SwiftUI framework with daily hands-on projects.
SwiftUI Tutorials on Apple’s Pathways — Apple’s own free training resources that cover the essentials step by step.
Both will show you how to take your Swift code and turn it into beautiful, interactive apps.
Step 5. Learn Full iOS App Development
The final step is understanding the entire app development cycle. This is where you go beyond coding basics and UI design to learn project structure, networking, data persistence, and App Store deployment.
One of the best-rated courses for this is on Udemy:👉 iOS 13 & Swift 5 – The Complete iOS App Development Bootcamp
This course will walk you through building complete iOS apps from scratch, covering everything you need to publish your own app or apply for junior developer roles.
Final Thoughts
Learning Swift doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With this step-by-step path, you’ll start with playful experiments, move through intensive but focused training, reinforce your knowledge with ongoing practice, then expand into UI design and full app development.
By following this order, you won’t waste time on scattered tutorials or endless theory. You’ll build real skills — fast.
So, if you’ve ever asked yourself “How do I learn Swift?”, the answer is simple:
Start today with Step 1 → r/Learn_Swift_Fast
What Topics Do You Need to Learn?
Download a list of topics you will be required to know to pass an interview for an iOS Developer role. Download is below.
Download Swift Study Guide
Enrol in a 3 day Swift Course (written by senior iOS Developers)
Learn Swift by enrolling in a our 3-day online course. We have 6 programs to learn and practice Swift, all included in the price. View all programs here. 3-day online course. The first 3 lessons are free and exist as a preview of course style, taught by one of the worlds most experienced iOS Developers and international consultant.
Tips to Sky rocket Your Swift Career 🚀
Focus on learning the Swift language itself. Most team members start their learning journey by studying Xcode and building apps. It's a lot of information and plenty to get confused about. Most of your colleagues will have many gaps in knowledge that affect their every-day anxiety with completing tasks and having it reviewed by others. Instead, why not become the one of the reviewers? Our advice is to stand out in the tech industry and if you want to stand out I would suggest becoming very knowledgable about the language itself; Every single developer will be using it and they will all be competing over Architecture and not the best use of language features. Armed with an incredible understanding of the language you will have the confidence in knowing you can maintain any existing product on the market.
Gather "Career Things" like they were collectibles in a game. This easy-to-remember and rather broad term is a great bit of advice. Too many engineers let the months go by without really taking on board many exciting projects or doing anything that wows any one. This is a terrible idea in every way. Stand out. Be the best at something (like understanding the language). When you change positions and apply to a different company you will have an interview and they'll grill you with many questions. The main bits to know are these; Your CV gets you the interview. You display your worth in the interview.
Your CV gets you the interview: Your short 2 page bullet-pointed CV is simply a list of amazing things you did to improve the team, the social element, the code quality, the income, how you increased user retention, how you added a successful feature and improved the app. You must collect career things.
You display worth in the interview: In the interview you want to fill the hour with saying similar phrases non-stop to "I was able to tweak the values and affect the income of the product simply by reducing the friction of the onboarding and providing a more seamless and pleasant user experience for the user. We now have only a 14% drop compared to most companies that have around 30% typically." Notice how you use "we" when referring to your current company in interviews. To simplify the phrase just-used, "I helped my company move forward. I improved the product, which led to an increased user experience and ultimately more profits for the company. I am a team player and I will improve your company at every opportunity possible."
Become confident in Interviews. You are now a talented Swift engineer who understands the Swift language and has a list of successful results you can pull out of the bag and discuss and any interview. You are constantly and infinitely talking about specifics of the Swift language and how cool and useful it is. You are stacking up one example after another of how you affected the results of the team and the company. You are great at telling these stories. The world is your oyster and you can be confident in your abilities as well as your choices in life.
Move company every 2 years. Ask for a £10,000 increase. When you become bored at your current job because you know too much think about moving, upgrading your job title and doubling your annual salary.
Be driven and be proud that you help keep the world moving by maintaining the digital services we all love and are constantly glued to.
Not built with A.I. A human with decades of experience wrote this article. It's designed to help you and provide some real-life guidance to start a career in the tech industry with some solid success, lots of growth and being great at what you do.
Why not take our online course and learn Swift in a weekend?
How to Learn Swift
Learn all topics in the Swift Study Guide, write tested systems in code alone & don't waste time building or learning UI (user interfaces). You can achieve all this at 3DaysOfSwift.com.
What Topics Do I need to Learn?
Foundational types, control flow, optionals, functions, closures, classes, structs, enums, value types, reference types, ARC (Automatic Reference Counting), extensions, protocols, concurrency, error handling and generics.
Below is the full list, available to download in markdown language.
Download
The recommended topics to study are those that each iOS Developer would be required or expected to know in order to pass an interview for a junior, mid-level or even a senior role.
Swift Study Guide
3DaysOfSwift.com | Online Swift Course
Beginner Topics
Topic 1: The Basics & Foundational Types
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/thebasics
Topic 2: Control Flow
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/controlflow
Topic 3: Optionals
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/optionalchaining
Topic 4: Functions
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/functions
Closures
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/closures
Topic 5: Classes
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/classesandstructures
Topic 6: Structs
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/classesandstructures
Topic 7: Enums
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/enumerations
Topic 8: Value Types
Reference Types
Topic 9: ARC (Automatic Reference Counting)
Mid-level Topics
Topic 10: Extensions
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/extensions
Topic 11: Protocols
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/protocols
Topic 12: Concurrency
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/concurrency
Topic 13: Error Handling
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/errorhandling
Topic 14: Generics
https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/documentation/the-swift-programming-language/generics
The Swift Online Course
The 3-day intensive course is the introduction to programming every student needs to start learning Swift as a beginner and also learning how to use Xcode as the industry-standard tool for writing software for Apple products. This course offers a strong transformation from absolute beginner to Swift engineer who built a strong foundation of the language that can easily grow in size by learning more topics and more advanced features. This short bootcamp combined with the Developers Toolkit (available to download as part of their monthly subscription plan) is an unstoppable force on the internet to teach beginners and junior iOS Developers how to use Swift and become a great Swift Engineer. All of these resources offered as part of their monthly subscription plan are all you need to start your journey learning Swift on a path to applying for a job in the tech industry.
Where Do I Learn Swift?
The website starts each students learning journey with a free 3 lesson preview. All you have to do is to sign up and start learning Swift free of charge. The 4th lesson will be provided by subscribing to a monthly plan which unlocks all of the online programs including the Developers Toolkit (Language reference guides and downloadable code examples). After completing the 3-day course each student will continue to enrol in the numbered programs displayed in our members centre. The 3rd program will start the students collection of the Developers Toolkit; The Official Swift Book written by Apple, a professionally written Xcode project and The Swift Cheatsheet (language reference guide).
How to Enrol
Click here to sign up and enrol.
How to Learn Swift
Learn all topics in the Swift Study Guide, write tested systems in code alone & don't waste time building or learning UI (user interfaces). You can achieve all this at 3DaysOfSwift.com.
Why not take our online course and learn Swift in a weekend?
🧕🏻🙋🏽♂️👨🏿💼👩🏼💼👩🏻💻💁🏼♀️👨🏼💼🙋🏻♂️🙋🏻♀️👩🏼💻🙋🏿💁🏽♂️🙋🏽♀️🙋🏿♀️🧕🏾🙋🏼♂️
Welcome to our community of 3DaysOfSwift.com students!
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We are not affiliated with 100 Days of Swift. If you want to learn SwiftUI please visit HackingWithSwift.com.
Apple developer tutorials for SwiftUI can be found here.
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