In a word? No. If you’re trying to pick up the fundamentals of iOS and its Cocoa Touch APIs, you’re better served at this point by learning Objective C. Swift is a very young language. It changes month by month. Swift might represent the future of iOS development but the present chugs along powered by Objective C.

When you learn Objective C, you buy in not just to iOS but to a wide and healthy ecosystem of books, videos, tutorials, discussion groups, mailing lists and so forth. Yes, you may may argue that those resources skew towards API knowledge over language knowledge — but the language they provide that knowledge in is inarguably Objective C.  You need experience with Foundation, UIKit, Quartz,  AVFoundation, and so forth. Many devs earn that expertise studying examples from GitHub and StackOverflow. In Objective C.

Swift remains immature. You’ll find yourself spending as much time fighting the compiler as learning the language. You create Swift apps line by line, adapting prior platform experience to new language limitations, often struggling with cryptic error messages ($T4 anyone? Unwrapped optional?) that reflect how young these tools are.

Sure, you may bring a lot of general knowledge and a strong computer science background, but what really matters at this point is going into development with an expectation of what you’re trying to build already on the ground. If you already know where you’re going, learning Swift will help get you there. If you’re new to iOS, there’s simply too much happening at once.

Right now many firms are searching for Swift-proficient developers. Whether this is a good idea or not is up for debate but what isn’t up for debate is what they’re really looking for:  people who already know the frameworks and who know how to put software together for iOS. The Swift skills experienced devs are picking up right now are icing on the cake, and an investment in the future.

Thanks, Fyolnish