Swift Coding Academy

The instructor I had Mark Meretzky was very knowledgeable. He went above and beyond in the source material we used for the class which is based on the Apple books 1) Intro to App Development with Swift and 2) App Development with Swift. There were a lot of typos and unclear instructions and missing information in the books which wasn't his fault (Apple wrote the book!). But he made sure to flesh out any information that was missing and was so patient in answering any questions students asked. And if he couldn't answer the question, he'd come back the next class and answer it! He was always well prepared for each class. Despite some of the shortcomings of the textbook, I think overall the outline of the course really covers the important areas that you need to know and to get started with Swift development. It is easily the best money I've ever spent given the amount of instruction time and the knowledge I gained in this class alone. The class covered many of the fundamentals you need to know in a programming language: Classes, Structures, Protocols, Constants/ Variables/Properties, Functions/Methods, Collections (Arrays, Dictionaries), Conditionals, Loops, Basic Operators, Scope, Extensions, Enumerations, Closures, etc. There were additional topics that weren't covered by the book that we had an extra 2 weeks to go over as well. And those are just programming topics. The class definitely goes into other topics that are essential to developing apps on iOS such as using Xcode, playgrounds, storyboard, reading Apple Developer documentation, using the iOS simulator, using some of the more popular Apple frameworks, etc. I'm not sure if it'll be the same instructor teaching this course in the future, but even if you take a look at the books the class is based on you can get an idea of what you'll be covering. If you're like me and prefer having an in-class experience where you ask questions in person then it's hard to beat what you get out of this course for the amount it costs. 270 hours for ~$1900? It's a steal! But be ready to work hard! You only get what you put into it and it's a long course.

Mark Meretzky did a fantastic job. He was always very well prepared. He covered a lot of stuff that I even wasn't aware of. For me that's the best course that you can have for this price. The material that we had to work with comes from Apple so Mark is not responsible of the content but he's very positive and he made sure that everything was clear for us. He even corrected all the mistakes that you can find in Apple's courses!!! I would say that he gave us 50 times more that was expected in the ebooks. The course was funny too. I will miss this class and I will miss Mark for sure.