Book Image

PHP 7 Data Structures and Algorithms

By : Mizanur Rahman
5 (1)
Book Image

PHP 7 Data Structures and Algorithms

5 (1)
By: Mizanur Rahman

Overview of this book

PHP has always been the the go-to language for web based application development, but there are materials and resources you can refer to to see how it works. Data structures and algorithms help you to code and execute them effectively, cutting down on processing time significantly. If you want to explore data structures and algorithms in a practical way with real-life projects, then this book is for you. The book begins by introducing you to data structures and algorithms and how to solve a problem from beginning to end using them. Once you are well aware of the basics, it covers the core aspects like arrays, listed lists, stacks and queues. It will take you through several methods of finding efficient algorithms and show you which ones you should implement in each scenario. In addition to this, you will explore the possibilities of functional data structures using PHP and go through advanced algorithms and graphs as well as dynamic programming. By the end, you will be confident enough to tackle both basic and advanced data structures, understand how they work, and know when to use them in your day-to-day work
Table of Contents (14 chapters)

Understanding priority queue

A priority queue is a special type of queue where items are inserted and removed based on their priority. In the programming world, the use of the priority queue is immense. For example, say that we have a very large e-mail queue system where we send a monthly newsletter through a queue system. What if we need to send an urgent email to a user using the same queue functionality? Since the general queue principle is to add the item at the end, the process of sending that message will be very much delayed. In order to solve the problem, we can use the priority queue. In such a case, we assign a priority to each node and sort them based on that priority. An item with higher priority will go to the top of the list and will be dequeued earlier.

We can take two approaches in building a priority queue.

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