Introduction to Xcode playgrounds

A playground is basically an interactive Swift coding environment that displays the results of each statement as updates are made without having the need to compile and run a project. You can use playgrounds to learn and explore Swift, prototype parts of your app, and create learning environments for others. The interactive Swift code environment lets you experiment with algorithms, explore system APIs, and even create your very own custom views without the need to create a project. Once you perfect your code in the playground, simply move this code into your project. Given that playgrounds are highly interactive, they are a wonderful vehicle for distributing code samples with instructive documentation and can even be used as an alternative medium for presentations.

With the new Xcode 7 IDE, you can incorporate rich text comments with bold, italic, and bulleted lists with the addition of having the ability to embed images and links. You can even embed resources and support Swift source code in the playground to make the experience incredibly powerful and engaging, while the visible code remains simple.

Playgrounds provide you with the ability to do the following:

Let's begin by opening the Xcode IDE and explore how to create a new playground file for the first time. Perform the following steps:

Once your project is created, you will be presented with the default playground template, as shown in the following screenshot:

In the next section, you will begin learning about some of the Swift language basics, start adding lines of code within this playground file, and see the results that we get when they are executed.