I’m trying to make minesweeper using rust and bevy, but it feels that my code is bloated (a lot of for loops, segments that seem to be repeating themselves, etc.)
When I look at other people’s code, they are using functions that I don’t really understand (map, zip, etc.) that seem to make their code faster and cleaner.
I know that I should look up the functions that I don’t understand, but I was wondering where you would learn stuff like that in the first place. I want to learn how to find functions that would be useful for optimizing my code.
What you’re asking about (how to learn clever techniques to e.g. turn your naive O(n2) algorithm into an O(n log n) one) is the kind of stuff taught in an algorithms / theory course as part of a CS degree. Here are some of the first search results for open content courses I found that look like they cover the right topics:
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-404j-theory-of-computation-fall-2020/pages/syllabus/
http://openclassroom.stanford.edu/MainFolder/CoursePage.php?course=IntroToAlgorithms
You also might want to consider a combinatorics / discrete math course.
In case others want to get into 18.404j, but don’t have the prerequisite knowledge, I made a pretty complete graph of all available MIT courses (at least until 2023) and linked them as a left-to-right dependency graph:
https://thaumatorium.com/articles/mit-courses/mit.drawio.svg
Just search for
18.404j- it’s an SVG, so search works.