Chapter 1. Walking Across the Playground
Swift is a powerful new programming language from Apple for macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS. It has been rapidly climbing in popularity since its release at Apple's WWDC 2014, and within a year already broke through as one of the top 20 languages, placing at number 18, based on GitHub usage (http://githut.info/) and stack overflow discussions. In this book, we are going to look at the core data structures and algorithms provided in the Swift standard library. We will also look at native Swift implementations for other commonly used data structures and algorithms, such as queues, stacks, lists, and hash tables. Next, we'll look at sorting algorithms and compare the performance characteristics of different algorithms, as well as how the input size effects performance. We will move on to native Swift implementations for various tree data structures and algorithms, and advanced search methods. We then close the book by looking at implementations of various graphing algorithms and the approaches for calculating performance and algorithm efficiency.
In this chapter, we will cover what data structures and algorithms are and why they are so important. Selecting the correct data structure and algorithm for a particular problem could mean either success or failure for your application; and potentially to the long-term success of your product or company.
We are going to start off by discussing the importance of data structures and why it will benefit you to have knowledge of the differences between them. We will then move on to some concrete examples of the fundamental data structures. Next, we will review some of the most advanced data structures that are built on top of the fundamental types. Once that base has been set, we will get to experiment with a few data structures using the Swift Read-Eval-Print-Loop (REPL), which we'll talk about shortly. Finally, we will wrap up this chapter by introducing the topic of algorithm performance so you can begin thinking about the trade-offs between the different data structures and algorithms we will discuss later on in this book.
