Summary

This course is designed to teach students how to understand and identify the differences between the Objective-C and Swift programming languages, and especially, how to rewrite from the former to the latter. Understanding communications between the two languages—called "interoperability"—is becoming more and more important for developers, particularly as we prepare for the arrival of Swift 3.0. In the course, students will write classes and add functionality to classes by writing and calling methods. After learning some basic Objective-C syntax, students will examine and break down an app written in Objective-C and rewrite it in Swift. The course will conclude with a review of and practice with the most common challenges for interoperability between Objective-C and Swift.

Expected Learning

This course will teach you the distinguishing language features of Objective-C, including basic syntax. With this knowledge you will be able to confidently answer some of the most commonly asked interview questions related to Objective-C. You will migrate an app from Objective-C to Swift and in so doing become familiar with the experience of deciphering an unfamiliar Objective-C codebase, an experience you are likely to encounter in your first job as an iOS developer. You will also get an opportunity to practice with interoperability between Objective-C and Swift, practice negotiating the differences between the languages of iOS.

When you look out at the iOS landscape you likely see that the number of engineers developing in Swift is growing rapidly, yet many apps and third party APIs are still written in Objective-C. This course is designed to help prepare you for that landscape.

Syllabus

Lesson 1 Objective-C and Swift, Compare and Contrast

Learn the distinguishing language features of Objective-C.

Lesson 2 Writing Classes

Familiarize yourself with Objective-C syntax. Write some classes and properties from scratch.

Lesson 3 Adding Functionality to a Class: Methods and Messages

Master how to write and call methods in Objective-C. Build a functioning game.

Lesson 4 Migrate an App from Objective-C to Swift: Part I

Write custom classes and incorporate third party frameworks and extensions.

Lesson 5 Migrate an App from Objective-C to Swift: Part II

Persist data with NSCoder and NSKeyedArchiver. Implement navigation with a collection view.

Lesson 6 Common Interoperability Challenges

Facilitate communication between the languages of iOS. Complete a set of coding challenges to sharpen interop skills.

Required Knowledge

Experience writing iOS apps in Swift.