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)

Graph representations

Graphs can be represented with two main forms while implementing them in Python. One way is to use an adjacency list, and the other is to use an adjacency matrix. Let's consider an example, shown in the following diagram, to develop both types of representation for graphs:

Adjacency lists

An adjacency list stores all the nodes, along with other nodes that are directly connected to them in the graph. Two nodes, A and B, in a graph G, are said to be adjacent if there is a direct connection between them. A list data structure in Python is used to represent a graph. The indices of the list can be used to represent the nodes or vertices in the graph.

At each index, the adjacent nodes to that vertex...