While the concept of optional types, as used in the Swift language, might seem a little confusing at first, the more you use them the more they will make sense. One of the biggest advantages with optional types is we get additional compile-time checks that alert us if we forget to initialize non-optionals prior to using them.
In this chapter, we described what optionals actually are and how they are defined internally in the Swift language. It is important to understand this concept because optionals are used a lot in Swift and knowing how they work internally will help you to use them properly . We will see additional examples of optionals later in this book.
In the next chapter, we will look at how to use collections.