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)

Representation error

It should be noted that the native double precision representation of floating-point numbers leads to some unexpected results. For example, consider the following:

>>> 1-0.9
0.09999999999999998
>>> 1-0.9==.1
False

This is a result of the fact that most decimal fractions are not exactly representable as a binary fraction, which is how most underlying hardware represents floating-point numbers. For algorithms or applications where this may be an issue, Python provides a decimal module. This module allows for the exact representation of decimal numbers and facilitates greater control of properties, such as rounding behavior, number of significant digits, and precision. It defines two objects, a Decimal type, representing decimal numbers, and a Context type, representing various computational parameters such as precision, rounding, and error handling...