Ok Ok, first of all , What are collections in Swift? It's simple!

As mentioned in swift.org :

Swift provides three primary collection types (arrays, sets, and dictionaries) for storing collections of values.

1. Arrays are ordered collections of values.
2. Sets are unordered collections of unique values.
3. Dictionaries are unordered collections of key-value associations.

... note that these collection types are implemented as generic types.

Assuming that you're familiar with at least one of these types, let's get familiar with the hero, Higher Order functions !

Higher Order functions

They're really simple ! Higher order functions are ones that deal with other functions, either as a parameter or as a return type .

As far as we need them for this series is that there are some higher order functions built by swift for collection types such as .map, .compactMap, .flatMap, .split , .filter, .reduce, .forEach and .sort.

We'd also try to see what our world would be without these lovely functions by example while learning how to make our life easier with them .

Believe me, they'd make your coding life much easier - swiftier :)

Learn about .map, .compactMap and .flatMap in the next exciting episode =)

Next: Part (II) : What are .map , .compactMap and .flatMap in Swift ?