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Table Of Contents
Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition
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In this section, you will learn about the HashTable class, also known as HashMap, a hash implementation of the Dictionary class.
Hashing consists of finding a value in a data structure in the shortest time possible. You learned in previous chapters that if we want to get a value from it (using a get method), we need to iterate through the structure until we find it. When we use a hash function, we already know which position the value is in, so we can simply retrieve it. A hash function is a function that, given a key, will return an address in the table where the value is.
For example, let's continue using the e-mail address book we used in the previous section. The hash function we will use is the most common one, called a lose lose hash function, in which we simply sum up the ASCII values of each character of the key length.

We will use an array to represent our data structure to have one very similar to that which we used in the diagram in the previous...