As coding gets more involved it is very important to get into good practice which will save you a lot of time from finding out what went wrong. I myself spent many hours going through code line by line with some basic school boy errors. In my last blog I wrote about how Swift as a forgiving language. This week I found there were a few things it was not so forgiving about.
In the third app Is it Prime a lot of the back end code is done in Playgrounds and most of my frustrations were from there.
Statement cannot begin with a closure expression
“Statement cannot begin with a closure expression”. What?! When I get a problem I do what most people do. I use Google! But putting this error message into Google wasn’t too helpful, there were many results but nothing very helpful.
The cause? It’s to do with the operand. In C, PHP and Javascript it is perfectly fine to do something like “if number !=2 …” but Swift doesn’t like this! There needs to be a space between a number and the operand for very good reasons I’m sure which I will find out later on. So just not putting in the space was stopping my app from comping and altering to “if number != 2 …” ensured I could continue.
The second most frustrating problem I had was “Prefix/postfix ‘=’ is reserved”, again I thought I could Google the answer, again Google came up short but this problem was quicker to fix.
In most programming languages such condition would be valid but in Swift having an exclamation mark at the end of a variable name means you want to unwrap it (telling Xcode the variable definitely has a valid value). So while I had “if number!=2 &&…” it should have been “if number !=2 &&…” all from missing a space! Such simple mistakes which causes such long delays.
In Rob’s iOS and Swift video tutorials he encourages you to pause the video, have a go and come back to see how his solution. So although he may take 7 or 8 minutes in a video lecture and you maybe spending an hour or 2. I can assure you that this is not out of the ordinary. And it is part if the learning process. And remember, if you get stuck the forums are available!
Keep coding! – Tak.
Paninis & PHP: Three Challenges I Faced In My First Dev Project
I’ve tried to fight it over the years, but there’s no use in denying it anymore. My name’s Andy and I am a web geek.
Since February this year, I’ve worked with Rob at Eco Web Hosting to help him find more time to work with on his Udemy courses. If you’re an Eco Web Hosting customer, you may have seen my name before.
If not, hello!
I didn’t come to The Complete Web Developer Course as a complete beginner to web development.
I’d made a few static HTML sites in my late teens and spent the last couple of years working in the hosting industry, though until now, my focus had been mostly on supporting and maintaining the platforms, rather than development on them.
My last job meant I needed to know how to read PHP to an extent, but that extent was the writing of
<?php phpinfo(); ?>(this creates a diagnostic PHP page that lets you check various limits and settings in PHP).I’d never developed a project of my own in PHP though.
Rob had always managed Eco Web Hosting through the customer control panel and directly in the back end database, but there’s only so long a business can grow without an admin system to manage all the data.
It was time for a CRM. Here’s what I’ve learnt from my challenges so far.
Continue Reading