Learn SwiftUI with Free Tutorials author: Paul Hudson

SwiftUI was announced during WWDC19’s keynote, and we’ve seen plenty of free tutorials such as articles, YouTube videos, books and more — to be sure, people are excited and keen to share that excitement. The world!

I’ve been creating a lot of SwiftUI tutorials myself, but I’ve also been reading a lot of other developers’ tutorials. In this article I’ve tried to pull together tutorials from each individual as everyone learns something different – hopefully you’ll find a tutorial that teaches SwiftUI in a way that suits you.

SwiftUI sample

Shortly after SwiftUI launched, I published an article called Get Starts with SwiftUI, which Outlines the basics of creating views, stacks, lists, and more.

Since then, I’ve made plenty of SwiftUI sample code and videos:

  • SwiftUI Sample Online – Free online version of my SwiftUI Sample code set.
  • SwiftUI Sample Ebook – A downloaded version of the book.
  • SwiftUI by Example Video Playlist – YouTube video playlist to help you solve common problems.

Recently, I’ve been working on creating videos of full apps in SwiftUI so that people can see concepts in action rather than isolated examples. Such as:

  • Build a dynamic list application using navigation and images
  • Build a logo guessing game with VStack, graphics, and alerts
  • Build the iBeacon detector using object bindings and custom modifiers
  • Build Core ML applications using stacks, steppers, and date pickers

These videos aren’t too long, but there’s still enough room to really show the power and simplicity of SwiftUI. Here’s an example to get you started:

Tutorial: Build a Dynamic List app with Navigation and images — SwiftUI Complete Apps #1

Start using SwiftUI

There are many people writing tutorials designed to help you get started with SwiftUI. They encounter various levels of difficulty in building content — all designed to help you get started, but some are easier than others!

Of course, I should start this list by saying that Apple’s own SwiftUI tutorial is excellent – lots of code, lots of screen shots, and even quiz questions to help test your learning.

For absolute beginners

  • Santosh Botre provides some good example code for the various SwiftUI components.
  • Sai Kambampati has a great tutorial on creating a nice list application with clipping and shading.
  • Martin Lasek wrote a very light-hearted introduction with lots of screenshots and room to experiment.
  • John Sundell has written an excellent beginner’s tutorial that introduces you to the basics of the various SwiftUI components.

Go further

  • Mischa HildebrandA tutorial was written that focuses on a specific part of the Swift syntax behind SwiftUI:someThe keyword.
  • Majid Jabrayilov has written a tutorial that guides you through building an application to search for GitHub Repos.
  • Rohan Panchal wrote a tutorial close to SwiftUI from the React Native perspective.
  • Audrey Tam has a very simple tutorial, but then moves up through states, combinations, alerts, etc.
  • Benedikt Terhechte has written an article exploring SwiftUI from a game engine perspective, going straight into stacks and states.

The film

We have all kinds of video creators in the Swift community and it’s great to see how excited they are about SwiftUI!

Here are the many SwiftUI video options available:

  • Hello SwiftUI! By Ben Scheirman.
  • About SwiftUI: Simple state management for Kilo Loco
  • MohamUI Azam’s introduction to binding in SwiftUI
  • MohamUI Azam transfers data between views in SwiftUI
  • Brian Advent’s simple SwiftUI app
  • SwiftUI: Facebook complex Layout – Brian Voong’s horizontal scroll view.
  • SwiftUI: @State and @Binding by Scott Smith
  • SwiftUI – Understand Binding – Martin Lasek
  • SwiftUI Beginners – Build your first app! Gary Tokman
  • SwiftUI Tutorial # 1 by Caleb Wells
  • Calculator tips by Ben Scheirman in SwiftUI
  • Use BOTH UIKit and SwiftUI in Kilo Loco projects

New videos with more topics appear every day, so if you need regular updates, you may want to subscribe to some of these channels.

General discussion; General communication

There is no end to hot topics on SwiftUI, but a few particularly experienced people spend a lot of time writing a more thoughtful view from a variety of angles.

In particular, I like these:

  • Matt Gallagher’s first impressions of SwiftUI compared it to his own declarative UI work.
  • RxSwift and Shai Mishali’s Apple merger “Cheat Sheet”
  • SwiftUI, Personal Ideas and David Cordero’s Model-View-Presenter
  • Learn SwiftUI samples by Ray Perez looking at SwiftUI in a short piece of code, focusing on how the language features Swift to make it work.

While nearly everyone subscribs to SwiftUI positively, it’s worth adding a little skepticism — see Jille Van der Weerd’s subscribing view of SwiftUI.

Where is it now?

Websites like JuanpeCatalan’s Awesome SwiftUI on SwiftUI and Yogesh Singh’s Awesome SwiftUI are popping up to help us keep track of the many resources available to SwiftUI – if you’re hungry for more SwiftUI, You should start there.

But ultimately, we are only in the early stages of SwiftUI and we can still expect a lot of changes ahead of version 1.0 of Xcode 11 GM. I don’t know about you, but I’m particularly looking forward to the Forms code, more wrappers for common UIKit controls, and the rest of the Combine framework falling apart!