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)

Python Objects, Types, and Expressions

Data structures and algorithms are two of the core elements of a large and complex software project. They are a systematic way of storing and organizing data in software so that it can be used efficiently. Python has efficient high-level data structures and an effective object-oriented programming language. Python is the language of choice for many advanced data tasks, for a very good reason. It is one of the easiest advanced programming languages to learn. Intuitive structures and semantics mean that for people who are not computer scientists, but maybe biologists, statisticians, or the directors of a start-up, Python is a straightforward way to perform a wide variety of data tasks. It is not just a scripting language, but a full-featured, object-oriented programming language.

In Python, there are many useful data structures and algorithms built into the language. Also, because Python is an object-based language, it is relatively easy to create custom data objects. In this book, we will examine Python's internal libraries and some of the external libraries, and we'll learn how to build your own data objects from first principles.

In this chapter, we will look at the following topics:

  • Obtaining a general working knowledge of data structures and algorithms
  • Understanding core data types and their functions
  • Exploring the object-oriented aspects of the Python programming language