Book Image

C# Data Structures and Algorithms

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

C# Data Structures and Algorithms

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Data structures allow organizing data efficiently. They are critical to various problems and their suitable implementation can provide a complete solution that acts like reusable code. In this book, you will learn how to use various data structures while developing in the C# language as well as how to implement some of the most common algorithms used with such data structures. At the beginning, you will get to know arrays, lists, dictionaries, and sets together with real-world examples of your application. Then, you will learn how to create and use stacks and queues. In the following part of the book, the more complex data structures will be introduced, namely trees and graphs, together with some algorithms for searching the shortest path in a graph. We will also discuss how to organize the code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. 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 (14 chapters)

Dictionaries


In the previous section, you got to know the Hashtable class as a non-generic variant of the hash table-related classes. However, it has a significant limitation, because it does not allow you to specify a type of a key and a value. Both the Key and Value properties of the DictionaryEntry class are of the object type. Therefore, you need to perform boxing and unboxing operations, even if all keys and values have the same type.

If you want to benefit from the strongly typed variant, you can use the Dictionary generic class, which is the main subject of this section of the chapter.

First of all, you should specify two types namely, a type of a key and a value, while creating an instance of the Dictionary class. Moreover, it is possible to define initial content of the dictionary using the following code:

Dictionary<string, string> dictionary = 
    new Dictionary<string, string> 
{ 
    { "Key 1", "Value 1" }, 
    { "Key 2", "Value 2" } 
}; 

In the preceding code, a new...