I started teaching myself to program when I was about 10 years old in 1988. Back then I learned from books. I went through books to learn languages and to learn

I started teaching myself to program when I was about 10 years old in 1988. Back then I learned from books. I went through books to learn languages and to learn frameworks or big applications (like X Windows.) As someone else said, Google was the big game changer for learning new languages or skills. What Stack Overflow has done has made it much easier to find answers to specific problems or questions. I don't feel like you can browse SO and come away learning Swift. But if you do run into a very specific issue you can Google it and quite probably find a solution that's on SO.