Summary

In this chapter, we examined several search algorithms. First, we looked at linear searching, or sequential searching. Linear searching is barely even an algorithm as your code is simply looping through the elements in a collection from left to right until a match is found. This approach is useful when working with very small collections, or with collections that have not been sorted, if for no other reason than it is easy to implement from a development point of view. However, when working with large sorted datasets, there are much better alternatives.

The next search algorithm we examined was the binary search. Binary search algorithms essentially divide-and-conquer the collection, halving the elements into smaller and smaller subsets of the original collection until a match is found or the list of possible matches has been exhausted. Whereas a linear search has an O(n) complexity cost, a binary search pattern has a much improved O(log(n)) complexity cost. However, it is absolutely...