Swift coding and development is slowly taking off as apple has moved over from Objective-C  to this new language called Swift. Now that it is taking off further I had decided a long time ago to jump into the stream to fully learn Swift. It was also a long time ago that I came across raywenderlich.com. And going back to it recently it has gone through a few big changes, and I have decided to review what I thought of the learning journey this website takes you on.

What I took away from this website is just how massive the coding catalog is for android and iOS is. One of the things that could make developers feel like they are going in the right direction is the fact they have this well thought out path for beginners. I always hear from developers “where do I go? what do I learn” Well the introduction path is very much step 1 then step 2 is to go learn whatever they want. There are so many tutorials on this website and the fact that it is constantly being updated and improved upon shows that they are in it for the long haul.

The video courses do cost money but when compared to going to college or doing a code school the cost at 179.99 a year or 14.99 a month, the price isn’t scary even in the slightest. What I enjoyed about the video tutorials is just how clear the teachers speak, how the video courses are short and sweet. You won’t be sitting there for 2 hours for 1 lesson. I like the micro chucks that the videos take, so you can do a few 5 – 20 minute videos then take a break without having to remember where you left off from a few hours long video.

Finally, one thing I did enjoy in this was the addition of the learning challenges where they want you to try this tricky coding exercise, and in the few cases when I got it wrong, when they walk through it in the video I realized what I did wrong and did it over again. Repetition is key to learning!

One of the small things I had an issue with when doing these video courses is the speakers can jump from screen to something else pretty fast and having to pause within that 2 second window to check and make sure my code is correct can be throwing a wrench in my learning flow. I also do love how all the articles are free and you can jump in and just start learning about something new like I love messing around with iOS animations, but I do wish the articles had like internal bookmarks so I can return to where I was within the page and not just the whole article cause some of them do get long and coming back to them means leaving the browser open on that spot and hoping to god it doesn’t auto refresh.

 I hope in the future they add more paths, such as a UI path or an advanced coding path or even underneath the videos add a “Would you like to learn more” and link to updated articles about more on a subject.

Now this is a very good question, who is this website for? Why spend money on it? It is for those people who want to jump into coding for iOS or Android, for building that app and adding another skill. It is very easy to get started with this website and the depth of the knowledge all depends on what you want to learn. If you are one of those developers who didn’t like learning in college or suffer from learning in a classroom setting and need a little more one on one private learning, then this I would highly suggest for you especially if you don’t want to read a textbook and instead want to feel like you are being privately tutored then this is for you.

• Cost
• First Lessons are free to give ya a feel for it.
• Supplement articles are free

• (sort of a con) YOU NEED 2 monitors for video learning. 1 monitor for your code and the other for watching the video.
• Teachers can move kind of fast
• Bookmarking an article doesn’t save your place only the article.

This website has definitely upped the game in recent memory and I see it exploding. If you are going to be going all in on learning app development I would highly suggest jumping into these lessons, they are very much pick up and learn. I will try to look into the books if people ask me to write a review on those and do a compare and contrast if I am asked about it.

*note: I didn’t touch the android/kotlin/unity courses, I mainly worked on the iOS path without the books.

See you space cowboy…