Book Image

Everyday Data Structures

By : William Smith
Book Image

Everyday Data Structures

By: William Smith

Overview of this book

Explore a new world of data structures and their applications easily with this data structures book. Written by software expert William Smith, you?ll learn how to master basic and advanced data structure concepts. ? Fully understand data structures using Java, C and other common languages ? Work through practical examples and learn real-world applications ? Get to grips with data structure problem solving using case studies
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Everyday Data Structures
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
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Preface
Free Chapter
1
Data Types: Foundational Structures

Min heap structure


Before we begin, we need to detail a few characteristics our heap structure will possess. For starters, we are going to implement the heap using an array, and the first node will occupy the 0 index in this array. This decision is important because it affects the formula we use to calculate each node's parent and Children. Next, we will need an object to represent the nodes in our heap. Since this is going to be a very simple object for our demonstration, we'll define its class in-line with our heap implementation.

Since this is a min heap, we will only need to implement the min operations. Therefore, our implementation must expose methods for FindMin (peek), ExtractMin (pop), and DeleteMin. The heap's Insert, Count, Children, and Parent operations will each be implemented as single methods.

Our min heap implementation will also need two supporting methods to re-order the collection whenever a node is added or removed. We'll call these methods OrderHeap and SwapNodes, and...