Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

By : Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka
Book Image

Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python - Second Edition

By: Dr. Basant Agarwal, Benjamin Baka

Overview of this book

Data structures allow you to store and organize data efficiently. They are critical to any problem, provide a complete solution, and act like reusable code. Hands-On Data Structures and Algorithms with Python teaches you the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms for building easy and maintainable applications. This book helps you to understand the power of linked lists, double linked lists, and circular linked lists. You will learn to create complex data structures, such as graphs, stacks, and queues. As you make your way through the chapters, you will explore the application of binary searches and binary search trees, along with learning common techniques and structures used in tasks such as preprocessing, modeling, and transforming data. In the concluding chapters, you will get to grips with organizing your code in a manageable, consistent, and extendable way. You will also study how to bubble sort, selection sort, insertion sort, and merge sort algorithms in detail. By the end of the book, you will have learned how to build components that are easy to understand, debug, and use in different applications. You will get insights into Python implementation of all the important and relevant algorithms.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)

String notations and concepts

Strings are basically a sequence of objects, mainly a sequence of characters. As with any other data type, such as an int or float, we need to store the data and operations that have to be applied to them. String data types allow us to store the data, and Python provides a rich set of operations and functions that can be applied to the data of the string data type. Most of the operations and functions provided by Python 3.7 that can be applied to the strings were described in detail in Chapter 1, Python Objects, Types, and Expressions.

Strings are mainly textual data that is generally handled very efficiently. The following is an example of a string (S)—"packt publishing".

A substring is also a sequence of characters that's part of the given string. For example, "packt" is the substring for the string "packt publishing...