Chapter 1, Walking Across the Playground, contains an introduction to data structures and algorithms, the Swift REPL, and how to enter Swift statements into it to produce results on the fly.

Chapter 2, Working with Commonly Used Data Structures, covers classes and structures, the implementation details for the array, dictionary, and set collection types, how Swift interoperates with Objective-C and the C system libraries, and protocol-oriented programming introduction.

Chapter 3, Standing on the Shoulders of Giants, covers how to conform to Swift protocols, how to implement a stack and queue structure, and implement several types so you can gain experience for choosing the right type based on the requirements of your application.

Chapter 4, Sorting Algorithms, covers algorithms, sorting algorithms and how to apply them using an array data structure, explore different algorithms that use comparison sorting and look at both simple sorting and divide-and-conquer strategies.

Chapter 5, Seeing the Forest through the Tree, explains the tree data structure, including a definition and its properties, an overview of different types of trees, such as binary trees, binary search trees (BST), B–trees, and splay trees with implementation details.

Chapter 6, Advanced Searching Methods, covers more advanced tree structures: red-black trees, AVL trees, Trie trees (Radix trees) and covers several Substring search algorithms.

Chapter 7, Graph Algorithms, explains graph theory and data structures for graphs, as well as depth-first search, breadth-first search, spanning tree, shortest path, and SwiftGraph.

Chapter 8, Performance and Algorithm Efficiency, shows you algorithm efficiency and how to measure it, Big-O notation, orders of common functions, and evaluating runtime complexity.

Chapter 9, Choosing the Perfect Algorithm, learn how to deal with problems that require algorithms and data structures by creating a high level solution, writing the implementation in Swift, calculating Big-O complexities of our solution to check if the algorithm behaves properly in a real-world situation, measuring and detecting bottlenecks, and modifying the solution to achieve better performance.

The basic requirements for this book are as follows:

Swift Data Structures and Algorithms is intended for developers who want to learn how to implement and use common data structures and algorithms natively in Swift. Whether you are a self-taught developer without a formal technical background or you have a degree in Computer Science, this book will provide with the knowledge you need to develop advanced data structures and algorithms in Swift using the latest language features. An emphasis is placed on resource usage to ensure the code will run on a range of platforms from mobile to server. A previous background in an object-oriented language is helpful, but not required, as each concept starts with a basic introductory.

In this book, you will find a number of text styles that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles and an explanation of their meaning. Code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles are shown as follows: "The initWith portion of the name is removed from the method name."

A block of code is set as follows:

class MovieList { 
    private var tracks = ["The Godfather", "The Dark Knight", "Pulp
    Fiction"] 
     
    subscript(index: Int) -> String { 
         
        get { 
            return self.tracks[index] 
        } 
         
        set { 
            self.tracks[index] = newValue 
        } 
    } 
} 

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

erik@iMac ~ swift
Welcome to Apple Swift version 3.0 (swiftlang-800.0.46.2 clang-
800.0.38). Type :help for assistance.
  1>

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, for example, in menus or dialog boxes, appear in the text like this: "In Xcode, go to File | New | Playground, and call it B05101_6_RedBlackTree."

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