Chapter 5. Linked Lists

In Chapter 2, Arrays, we learned about the array data structure. An array (or we can also call it a list) is a very simple data structure that stores a sequence of data. In this chapter, you will learn how to implement and use a linked list, which is a dynamic data structure, meaning we can add or remove items from it at will and it will grow as needed.

Arrays (or lists) are probably the most common data structure used to store a collection of elements. As we mentioned before in this book, each language has its own implementation of arrays. This data structure is very convenient and provides a handy [] syntax to access its elements. However, this data structure has a disadvantage: the size of the array is fixed (in most languages) and inserting or removing items from the beginning or from the middle of the array is expensive because the elements need to be shifted over (even though we learned that JavaScript has methods from the array class that will do...