Book Image

Python Data Structures and Algorithms

By : Benjamin Baka
Book Image

Python Data Structures and Algorithms

By: Benjamin Baka

Overview of this book

Data structures allow you to organize data in a particular way efficiently. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. In this book, you will learn the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms. With this easy-to-read book, you will be able to understand the power of linked lists, double linked lists, and circular linked lists. You will be able to create complex data structures such as graphs, stacks and queues. We will explore the application of binary searches and binary search trees. You will learn the common techniques and structures used in tasks such as preprocessing, modeling, and transforming data. We will also discuss how to organize your code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. The book will explore in detail sorting algorithms such as bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and merge sort. By the end of the book, you will learn how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface
5
Stacks and Queues
7
Hashing and Symbol Tables

Complexity classes


The problems that computer algorithms try to solve fall within a range of difficulty by which their solutions are arrived at. In this section, we will discuss the complexity classes N, NP, NP-complete, and NP-hard problems.

P versus NP

The advent of computers has sped up the rate at which certain tasks are performed. In general, computers are good at perfecting the art of calculation and all problems that can be reduced to a set of mathematical computations. However, this assertion is not entirely true. There are some nature or classes of problems that just take an enormous amount of time for the computer to make a sound guess, let alone find the right solution.

In computer science, the class of problems that computers can solve within polynomial time using a step-wise process of logical steps is called P-type problems, where P stands for polynomial. These are relatively easy to solve.

Then there is another class of problems that is considered very hard to solve. The word...