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

Summary


This chapter started with a brief introduction on the importance of data structures and algorithms, and why it's important to develop both a broad and deep understanding of them to help you solve difficult problems.

Next, a brief introduction to the Swift REPL was provided where you learned how to enter Swift statements into it to produce results on the fly, and a quick reference of the most frequently used keyboard extensions was provided. We discussed the two fundamental data structures used in computer science and provided examples of the array and singly linked list classes; we'll expand into much greater details on these in the following chapters. We learned about data types in Swift and introduced the collection types available in the Swift standard library. We learned about asymptotic analysis toward the end of the chapter to help bring awareness of how different algorithms can dramatically affect performance.

In the next chapter, we will cover in depth the collection types available in the Swift standard library, followed by a close look at how bridging is performed by legacy Cocoa objects.