Overview
Learning to program with Swarm will require reading example applications, studying the technical reference material and sometimes even getting down to the level of reviewing the header files in libraries. It does currently require a good hands-on knowledge of object-oriented programming and software development processes in general.
Swarm is not yet a `shrink-wrapped' simulation toolkit. There are many of those kind of products on the market. However, with these packages, the ease of use comes at a price - you are locked into the that vendor's particular modelling paradigm. Swarm was intended to embrace many different types of modelling - consequently, it can be more difficult for a novice user - but more powerful in the long-run.