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

Getting the size of the list


We would like to be able to get the size of the list by counting the number of nodes. One way we could do this is by traversing the entire list and increasing a counter as we go along:

    def size(self):
         count = 0
         current = self.tail
         while current:
             count += 1
             current = current.next
         return count 

This works, but list traversal is potentially an expensive operation that we should avoid when we can. So instead, we shall opt for another rewrite of the method. We add a size member to the SinglyLinkedList class, initializing it to 0 in the constructor. Then we increment size by one in the append method:

class SinglyLinkedList:
     def __init__(self):
         # ...
         self.size = 0

     def append(self, data):
         # ...
         self.size += 1 

Because we are now only reading the size attribute of the node object, and not using a loop to count the number of nodes in the list, we get to reduce the...