This was the most useful book to get me started with Swift programming. The projects are interesting and fun. The style of teaching was informative and the concepts taught are practical for a lot of app development. If you want to learn swift by writing apps, this is the book for you!

HWS is one of the few books (as of the end of 2016) that is thoroughly updated for Swift 3. While Swift is too massive to be completely covered in one or even several books, HWS covers a lot of ground. Apple's "The Swift Programming Language" reads as more of an encyclopedia, while HWS is like a compendium of short stories. You write a couple dozen functioning apps over a spectrum of app genres. Hudson really did his research on Swift's functionalities, and he product tested his apps iteratively before putting them in the book. A couple of times I had to Google my way to solving glitches that I couldn't figure out from Xcode's cryptic error messages, but that was in itself good training. Far more commonly, Hudson explains things much better than most user forums I've seen. Hudson often gives the brief history of the inevitable cruft inhabiting a even new language like Swift, making the obscure suddenly intelligible. Above all, Hudson clearly wants his readers to learn good Swift coding, unlike some teachers who seem to need to feed their egos by lording their superior knowledge over the student. After finishing HWS, I can watch any WWDC session video and follow nearly all of it: "Hey, I've seen that before..." I would recommend HWS to anybody beginning to learn Swift 3.

A very well written Swift programming book with a huge emphasis on hands on learning as opposed to theoretical teaching. The book is written in a language that is easy to understand even for none programmers like myself. I am currently on project 26 and I absolutely love every second of it. Each project teachs you something new without overwhelming you with too much new information at a time, very well balance. Paul also updates the book on a regular basis so you're always on the latest and greatest version of Swift.

This book is a fantastic series of tutorials covering a very impressive amount of iOS ground. You will learn how to do a wide variety of practical and useful things in iOS/Swift development. Before reading this book, I had taken multiple online courses for iOS development. This book taught me about all sorts of available features and libraries that were never covered in the other courses.