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.