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)

Complexity classes

Complexity classes group problems on the basis of their difficulty level, and the resources required in terms of time and space to solve them. In this section, we discuss the N, NP, NP-Complete, and NP-Hard complexity classes.

P versus NP

The advent of computers has sped up the rate at which certain tasks can be performed. In general, computers are good at perfecting the art of calculation and solving problems that can be reduced to a set of mathematical computations.

However, this assertion is not entirely true. There are some classes of problems that take an enormous amount of time for the computer to make a sound guess, let alone find the right solution.

In computer science, the class of problems that...