In this chapter, we looked at hash tables. We looked at how to write a hashing function to turn string data into integer data. Then, we looked at how we can use hashed keys to quickly and efficiently look up the value that corresponds to a key.
Further, we looked at the difficulties in the implementation of hash tables due to collisions in hash values. This led us to look at collision resolution strategies, so we discussed two important collision resolution methods, which are linear probing and chaining.
In the last section of this chapter, we studied symbol tables, which are often built using hash tables. Symbol tables allow a compiler or an interpreter to look up a symbol (such as a variable, function, or class) that has been defined and retrieve all information about it.
In the next chapter, we will talk about graphs and other algorithms.