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)

Recursion and backtracking

Recursion is particularly useful for divide and conquer problems; however, it can be difficult to understand exactly what is happening, since each recursive call is itself spinning off other recursive calls. A recursive function can be in an infinite loop, therefore, it is required that each recursive function adhere to some properties. At the core of a recursive function are two types of cases:

  • Base cases: These tell the recursion when to terminate, meaning the recursion will be stopped once the base condition is met
  • Recursive cases: The function calls itself and we progress towards achieving the base criteria

A simple problem that naturally lends itself to a recursive solution is calculating factorials. The recursive factorial algorithm defines two cases: the base case when n is zero (the terminating condition), and the recursive case when n is...