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)

Searching

One of the most important operations for all data structures is searching for the elements from the stored data. There are various methods to search for an element in the data structures; in this chapter, we shall explore the different strategies that can be used to find elements in a collection of items.

The searching operation is a very important operation for sorting. It is virtually impossible to sort the data without using some variant of a search operation. The sorting algorithm will be fast if the searching algorithm is efficient. In this chapter, we will be discussing different searching algorithms.

The performance of a search operation is heavily influenced by whether the items about to be searched have already been sorted or not, as we will see in the subsequent sections.

By the end of this chapter, you will be able to do the following:

  • Understand various...