Welcome to the developing applications with Swift book. It's my pleasure to talk about iOS development and Swift. This book assumes that you have some basic experience in iOS development, and a little experience of using Swift. If you don't have any experience of Swift, don't worry, just go ahead with us and be prepared to master the iOS development using Swift. I believe in learning by example methodology and, starting from Chapter 3, Touch ID, we will introduce the new technology of iOS 8, and write a simple demo on it using Swift.

In this chapter, we will talk about the Swift programming language, and get our hands dirty with Swift. If you are familiar with Swift, you can either skip this chapter, or you can review your Swift knowledge. We will talk about the Swift language and its features, and how to try it using Playgrounds in Xcode 6. Playground is a new, awesome, and innovative feature that allows you to try any piece of code, and see the results without explicitly running, or even compiling your code. You will become familiar with the code structure, and some important data types such as arrays, dictionaries, and so on.