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)

Summary

In this chapter, we have looked at a general overview of algorithm design. Importantly, we studied a platform-independent way to measure an algorithm's performance. We looked at some different approaches to algorithmic problems. We looked at a way to recursively multiply large numbers and also a recursive approach for merge sort. We learned how to use backtracking for exhaustive search and generating strings. We also introduced the idea of benchmarking and a simple platform-dependent way to measure runtime.

In the following chapters, we will revisit many of these ideas with reference to specific data structures. In the next chapter, we will discuss linked lists and other pointer structures.