Data Structures Introduction

Data structures are collections of values, the relationships among them, and the functions or operations that can be applied to the data.
The most common data structure that people are most familiar with is the array. It is a data structure that comes free in most if not all programming languages. It comes with methods that we can use to add, remove, push, pop, sort, reverse etc.  
There are data structures that also don’t come free of charge in programming languages and we will be creating some of them and giving reasons why we should use them in certain cases.
The data structures that we will be going over are 

• Singly Linked Lists
• Doubly Linked Lists
• Stacks
• Queues
• Binary Search Trees
• Binary Heaps
• Graphs

And So much more
You may ask why so many data structures?
Well, the simple answer is different data structures excel at different things. Some are highly specialized, while others (like the array) are more generally used. 
Why do we care? 
Well, the more time you spend as a developer the more likely the developer has to use one of these data structures. Knowing which is best to use in certain situations is what makes a great developer. For Instance,
If you are working with map/location data, use a graph.
You need an ordered list with fast inserts and removals at the beginning and end, use a Linked List.
Web scraping nested HTML, Use a tree.
Writing a scheduler, use a binary heap.
In our next article, we will start talking about our first data structure which is the singly linked list. Hope you are excited. 
See you next time.
 
 

Written by Okocha Ebube.