Preface

Data structures play a vital role in storing and organizing data within an application. It is important to choose the right data structure to significantly improve the application’s performance, as it is highly desirable to be able to scale the application as the data quantity increases. This new edition teaches you essential Python data structures and the most common and important algorithms for building easy, maintainable applications. It also allows you to implement these algorithms with working examples and easy to follow step-by-step instructions.

In this book, you will learn the essential Python data structures and the most common algorithms. With this easy-to-read book, you will learn how to create complex data structures such as linked lists, stacks, heaps, queues, trees, and graphs as well as sorting algorithms including bubble sort, insertion sort, heapsort, and quicksort. We also describe various selection algorithms such as randomized and deterministic selection and provide a detailed discussion of various data structure algorithms and design paradigms such as greedy algorithms, divide-and-conquer, and dynamic programming. In addition, complex data structures such as trees and graphs are explained with easy pictorial examples to understand the concepts of these useful data structures. You will also learn various important string processing and pattern-matching algorithms such as KMP and Boyer-Moore algorithms along with their easy implementation in Python.