Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

By : Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

By: Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka

Overview of this book

Data structures allow you to store and organize data efficiently. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python teaches you the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms for building easy and maintainable applications. This book helps you to understand the power of linked lists, double linked lists, and circular linked lists. You will learn to create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. As you make your way through the chapters, you will explore the application of binary searches and binary search trees, along with learning common techniques and structures used in tasks such as preprocessing, modeling, and transforming data. In the concluding chapters, you will get to grips with organizing your code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. You will also study how to bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and merge sort algorithms in detail. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications. You will get insights into Python implementation of all the important and relevant algorithms.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

Interpolation search

The interpolation searching algorithm is an improved version of the binary search algorithm. It performs very efficiently when there are uniformly distributed elements in the sorted list. In a binary search, we always start searching from the middle of the list, whereas in the interpolation search we determine the starting position depending on the item to be searched. In the interpolation search algorithm, the starting search position is most likely to be the closest to the start or end of the list depending on the search item. If the search item is near to the first element in the list, then the starting search position is likely to be near the start of the list.

The interpolation search is another variant of the binary search algorithm that is quite similar to how humans perform the search on any list of items. It is based on trying to make a good guess...