The arrival of Swift has been a marvellous education, it has been a reason for so many writers and bloggers to revisit core elements of programming and to explain them within the context of this new language. Wayne Bishop's book continues this tradition by taking up the challenge of presenting us with well-established data structures explained through Swift.
Each data structure that Swift Algorithms & Data Structures: A practical guide to concepts, theory and code presents is accompanied by a diagrammatic illustration, alongside a clear and concise explanation, followed by code implementations of how the data structures can be utilised in Swift.
I can't imagine a more straightforward presentation of the data structures contained in the book, and if you wish to be a more intelligent programmer then this book deserves your time.
How quickly you progress through the book will depend on your current level of programming knowledge. The book begins with the List structure, which is a good place to start because it is not a huge leap from an array. The discussion of Queues, meanwhile, is a great example of how the book clearly presents its material in a simple but highly effective visual manner.
The greater depths of the book dive into Binary Search Trees, Graphs and shortest paths, Heaps, Hash Tables, and many other areas that are fascinating but which take some thinking time to absorb. This is no fault of the book, these are complex areas, and the book provides not only an end-to-end read but a great reference resource to sit on your shelf as you learn and grow in your programming knowledge.
Wayne Bishop resists writing a book that extends into many hundreds of pages in favour of something that we can easily dive in and out of. It is a better book because of this.
I'm looking forward now to applying the knowledge held in this book and thinking not only of practical applications but also analogies for understanding (and teaching) these data structures to others.
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