Everyday Data Structures

A practical guide to learning data structures simply and easily

About This Book

• This book is a very practical, friendly, and useful guide that will help you analyze problems and choose the right data structures for your solution
• Learn to recognize data patterns for determining which structures apply to a given problem
• Explore the unique rules or “gotchas” that will help you become an excellent programmer

Who This Book Is For

If you’re self-taught programmers in any language who wants to gain a solid understanding of data structures and how to use them to solve real-world problems in your day-to-day development work, then this book is for you.

What You Will Learn

• A rapid overview of data types, applications for each type, best practices and high-level variations between platforms
• Review the most common data structures and build working examples in the languages used for mobile platform software development
• Understand advanced data structure concepts such as generic collections, searching and sorting algorithms, and recursion
• Learn to use Stacks (LIFO) and queues (FIFO) in your daily application
• Add/remove objects and nest arrays and dictionaries within another dictionary and understand why such architecture is often preferred or necessary
• Get acquainted with the tree structures such as heap, binary, and graphs, apply them to work
• Unleash the power of different sorting techniques such as bubble sort, quick sort, merge sort, insertion sort, and radix sort
• Perform searching operations on arrays, heaps, graphs, and binary trees in different languages

In Detail

If you want to learn different data structures and their real-world applications quickly through practical examples, then Everyday Data Structures is for you. This book can introduce you to new data structures and their potential applications through examples in languages common to mobile software development on the most popular platforms. The examples are presented with real-world concepts using language that everyone will understand.

This book is logically divided into two parts; the first one covers the basic data structures that are built into most languages such as Objective-C, C#, Java, and Swift. It will cover detailed analysis of the common data structures such as arrays, lists, stacks, Queues, and heaps, typical applications, and specific concerns for each language. Each chapter will provide in-depth examples in several popular languages based on real-world applications.

The second part will cover more advanced data structures such as generic collections, sorting, searching, and recursion and ways to use those structures in everyday applications.

Style and approach

This is a practical, result-focused guide, which is easy to follow, but also fast-paced and really satisfying with full of examples.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Data Types: Foundational Structures
Chapter 2. Arrays: Foundational Collections
Chapter 3. Lists: Linear Collections
Chapter 4. Stacks: LIFO Collections
Chapter 5. Queues: FIFO Collections
Chapter 6. Dictionaries: Keyed Collections
Chapter 7. Sets: No Duplicates
Chapter 8. Structs: Complex Types
Chapter 9. Trees: Non-Linear Structures
Chapter 10. Heaps: Ordered Trees
Chapter 11. Graphs: Values with Relationships
Chapter 12. Sorting: Bringing Order Out Of Chaos
Chapter 13. Searching: Finding What You Need