Hi, yes, I am interested in just iOS development. My concern in older lessons is it not being updated to the latest version of Swift and I didn't want to learn older or depreciated code. Are their any publishers of books that make really good training for novices?
That's what I'd call the advantage of general programming skills. It doesn't really get outdated.
As mentioned, I think a lot of the free material is actually superior to the paid stuff, so Apple's own documentation (books can be found in iBooks, and documentation on the web and through Xcode), and Swift Playgrounds is a good, albeit slow moving, training system for newcomers to code.
When you start your learning projects, make it throwaway and not your dream app from the start. You'll make many mistakes along the way that'll make your first few attempts impossible to manage quickly.
As mentioned I think there are, or at least were, good resources on iTunes U and YouTube, especially from Stanford, but I don't know if there are any Swift resources. I used it for Obj-C and Java mostly.
What is your end goal with wanting to learn? If you want to eventually do it professionally, either freelance or for a company, I would recommend a different path than if it's a personal project. Because in the case of professional aspirations you should also really look into design patterns and software architecture. Probably a good extra for a personal hobby too, but less important.
My advice is to start by learning code syntax before starting to focus on iOS specifically. Swift as a language is platform agnostic, so start by learning the language, not the frameworks that each platform uses. Again, Apple's book "The Swift Programming Language" is a good and thorough explanation, though probably more aimed at people experienced already. They have a more beginner friendly variant that I can't remember the name of. And Playgrounds for iPad is very friendly.
Download sample projects through developer.apple.com or Xcode and see if you can read and understand the code and follow the guides in the documentation. Especially the SwiftUI guides are absolutely excellent, but using SwiftUI does limit you to iOS 13 (and other new platforms).
Even if you're stone set on learning Swift and nothing else, I might even still recommend Objects First with Java. It's a very beginner friendly book, it teaches good object oriented design, and Swift is, at least in part, still an object oriented language, and you can take what you learn and translate it to Swift. The general principles are relatively universal, even if some things have smarter alternatives on Swift, but the process of learning to translate from one language to another could be helpful too.
And there's no shame in looking things up. I can tell you that "real programmers" spend a lot of time looking up things. None of us can remember every API. And you're also always welcome to ask me on here if you end up in trouble. My best advice for now though is just to get started and get your feet wet. Doesn't matter what you choose to start with, cause in the end you'll find it's circular dependencies all the way down. Everything relies on knowing something else, so you just have to get in the loop, and keep learning and things will gradually start making more sense as you continuously fill in the gaps of understanding.
A good mathematical foundation also doesn't hurt. Understanding the difference between a Set and a List for instance.
