Swift.org

On December 3, 2015, Apple officially released the Swift language, supporting libraries, the debugger, and the package manager to the open source community under the Apache 2.0 license. At that time, the swift.org site was created as the community's gateway to the project. This site has a wealth of information and should be your primary site to find out what is happening in the Swift community and the language itself. The blog posts will keep you up to date with new releases of Swift, new Swift open source libraries, changes to the standard library, and other Swift news.

You can also download pre-built binaries for several flavors of Linux. At the time this book is being written, we can download pre-built binaries for Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, CentOS 8, and Amazon Linux 2. The getting started page provides a list of dependencies for the previously mentioned flavors of Linux and instructions on how to install the binaries.

The website also includes the official Swift documentation, which includes things like the language guide, a Swift introduction, and an API design guideline. Understanding the API design guideline is essential to ensuring that your code meets the recommended coding standards. In Chapter 18, Swift Formatting and Style Guide, we provide recommendations for coding standards in Swift, which go hand in hand with Apple's recommendations.

You will also find information on how to contribute to the Swift community, where the Swift source code can be downloaded, and there is even a section on recommended Google Summer of Code projects with Swift. If you really want to get into Swift development, whether it be server-side, Mac, or iOS development, I would recommend making regular visits to the swift.org site to keep up to date with what is happening in the Swift community.

Apple and the Swift community also have a number of documentation resources that you can use for reference.