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 3. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants

The Swift standard library provides the building blocks by providing basic collection types you can use to build your applications. In this chapter, we're going to build on what we learned in the previous chapter and design several commonly used data structures that are used in computer science. Suppose you're receiving a steady stream of data and you want to ensure that it gets processed in the order it arrived. Well, if you use an array data structure, you would need to ensure the data is appended at the end of the array and read from the beginning of it. What if you needed to insert data based on the priority of the data type?

In this chapter, we're going to learn how to visualize data structures so we'll have a clear picture of what they look like in our head. This will prove helpful when you're working through your application requirements; if you can visualize in your head how the data is stored you'll be able to select the best algorithm...