Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By : Mario Eguiluz Alebicto
Book Image

Swift Data Structure and Algorithms

By: Mario Eguiluz Alebicto

Overview of this book

Apple’s Swift language has expressive features that are familiar to those working with modern functional languages, but also provides backward support for Objective-C and Apple’s legacy frameworks. These features are attracting many new developers to start creating applications for OS X and iOS using Swift. Designing an application to scale while processing large amounts of data or provide fast and efficient searching can be complex, especially running on mobile devices with limited memory and bandwidth. Learning about best practices and knowing how to select the best data structure and algorithm in Swift is crucial to the success of your application and will help ensure your application is a success. That’s what this book will teach you. Starting at the beginning, this book will cover the basic data structures and Swift types, and introduce asymptotic analysis. You’ll learn about the standard library collections and bridging between Swift and Objective-C collections. You will see how to implement advanced data structures, sort algorithms, work with trees, advanced searching methods, use graphs, and performance and algorithm efficiency. You’ll also see how to choose the perfect algorithm for your problem.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Swift Data Structure and Algorithms
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 2. Working with Commonly Used Data Structures

The Swift language is truly powerful, but a powerful language is nothing if it doesn't have a powerful standard library to accompany it. The Swift standard library defines a base layer of functionality that you can use for writing your applications, including fundamental data types, collection types, functions and methods, and a large number of protocols.

We're going to take a close look at the Swift standard library, specifically looking at support for collection types, with a very low level examination of arrays, dictionaries, sets, and tuples.

The topics covered in this chapter are as follows:

  • Using the Swift standard library

  • Implementing subscripting

  • Understanding immutability

  • Interoperability between Swift and Objective-C

  • Swift protocol-oriented programming