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)

Hash tables

A hash table is a data structure where elements are accessed by a keyword rather than an index number, unlike in lists and arrays. In this data structure, the data items are stored in key/value pairs similar to dictionaries. A hash table uses a hashing function in order to find an index position where an element should be stored and retrieved. This gives us fast lookups since we are using an index number that corresponds to the hash value of the key.

Each position in the hash table data structure is often called a slot or bucket and can store an element. So, each data item in the form of (key, value) pairs would be stored in the hash table at a position that is decided by the hash value of the data. For example, the hashing function maps the input string names to a hash value; the hello world string is mapped to a hash value of 92, which finds a slot position in...