Join the Swift Algorithm Club!
The Swift Algorithm Club is a popular open source project (with over 4,000 stars on GitHub) that implements popular algorithms and data structures in Swift. Now, we’re pleased to announce that the project is officially sponsored by raywenderlich.com – and we’re looking for contributors! By Kelvin Lau.
Getting Started as a Contributor
Contributing to open source projects is a great learning experience and a great way to give back to the community. And we could definitely use a lot of help on the Swift Algorithm Club, so why not join us? :]
We’re currently looking for contributors to the club for the following tasks:
- Implement missing algorithms
- Improve existing algorithms or explanations
- Help us port everything to Swift 3 (not yet – once it’s closer to release)
- Unit tests, fixes for typos – no contribution is too small! :]
For more details, please check out our comprehensive guide for contributors and see how you can help.
Where to Go From Here?
No matter how long you’ve been writing code, it’s likely there’s something you can learn from digging into the deeper details of structures and algorithms. We’re excited to help provide this information to Swift community.
Our focus is to lay the groundwork for the standard data structures and algorithms you’d encounter in computer science courses. We’d like to expand our interview questions section to encompass as many brain twisting complex algorithms as we can.
Whether you’re a beginning learner or a seasoned algorithm wrangler, there are lots of ways you can contribute:
- Learner: Ask lots of questions! Developers are generally very nice people, and we learn from each other by investigating problems as a team. Simply open an issue in the repository to get started!
- Contributor: Help others learn by contributing to the club! Every month, we’ll choose an algorithm to feature on raywenderlich.com. Perhaps we’ll even choose one that you contributed! We’re always happy to recognize outstanding work from the community.
Chris and I are excited to see how the Swift Algorithm Club evolves. Your first step (Yes! Go do it right now!) is to check out the Swift Algorithm Club repository and start reading.
Any questions or comments? Join the discussion on the forum — or come see us on GitHub!
Get the Data Structures and Algorithms Book!
Why not check out our Data Structures and Algorithms in Swift book, available on our store?
In Data Structures and Algorithms in Swift, you’ll learn how to implement the most popular and useful data structures and when and why you should use one particular datastructure or algorithm over another. This set of basic data structures and algorithms will serve as an excellent foundation for building more complex and special-purpose constructs.
As well, the high-level expressiveness of Swift makes it an ideal choice for learning these core concepts without sacrificing performance.
- You’ll start with the fundamental structures of linked lists, queues and stacks, and see how to implement them in a highly Swift-like way.
- Move on to working with various types of trees, including general purpose trees, binary trees, AVL trees, binary search trees and tries.
- Go beyond bubble and insertion sort with better-performing algorithms, including mergesort, radix sort, heap sort and quicksort.
- Learn how to construct directed, non-directed and weighted graphs to represent many real-world models, and traverse graphs and trees efficiently with breadth-first, depth-first, Dijkstra’s and Prim’s algorithms to solve problems such as finding the shortest path or lowest cost in a network.
- And much, much more!
By the end of this book, you’ll have hands-on experience solving common issues with data structures and algorithms — and you’ll be well on your way to developing your own efficient and useful implementations.