Sunday, November 7, 2010

Why Learn Data Structures

Blogged By : Jibrael Jos
Are you planning to be in Software Development line ? Do you plan to code ?

Every program you will ever write does requires some memory usage, may it be simple variables, arrays, structs or maybe even complicated structures like Adjacency List.

When you code a card game
  • How do you store the deck
  • The current persons hand
  • The different possibilities
When you code a Railways Project
  • How will you store a trip
  • How will you store a route

When you code a Banking Application
  • How will you store the account details when you calculate interest
  • How will you store the interest slabs of an account
  • How will you track the minimum balance for each account
In general applications
  • How does a compiler store the symbol table
  • How Database store its indexes
  • How does Operating System manage its queues
  • How does MS Word (or an editor) manage to do cut , copy , paste
  • What does Google Map use to find the shortest path
  • How does MS Excel sort a sheet

By the end of this course a students should be able to comprehend and code the following DS
  • Linked List
  • Double Linked List
  • Stack
  • Queue
  • Heap
  • Binary Search Tree
  • Different kinds of Sorts
  • Different kinds of search
  • Understand application of DS

Student should be able to
  • Understand and read other peoples code
  • Debug Programs
  • Understand the efficiency of any function they write
  • Minimize loops where possible
  • Appreciate usage of DS in OS, Compilers, Databases etc


Some examples of Data Structures and a good starting point to know more please try the following link
Wiki Links to Different Types of DS

A good place to learn about sorts
Wiki Links to Sorts

Keep a copy of the excel sheet I use for teaching Sorting
eChalk and Talk

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