Book Image

C# Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By : Marcin Jamro
Book Image

C# Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By: Marcin Jamro

Overview of this book

Building your own applications is exciting but challenging, especially when tackling complex problems tied to advanced data structures and algorithms. This endeavor demands profound knowledge of the programming language as well as data structures and algorithms – precisely what this book offers to C# developers. Starting with an introduction to algorithms, this book gradually immerses you in the world of arrays, lists, stacks, queues, dictionaries, and sets. Real-world examples, enriched with code snippets and illustrations, provide a practical understanding of these concepts. You’ll also learn how to sort arrays using various algorithms, setting a solid foundation for your programming expertise. As you progress through the book, you’ll venture into more complex data structures – trees and graphs – and discover algorithms for tasks such as determining the shortest path in a graph before advancing to see various algorithms in action, such as solving Sudoku. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned how to use the C# language to build algorithmic components that are not only easy to understand and debug but also seamlessly applicable in various applications, spanning web and mobile platforms.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Division of data types

While developing applications in the C# language, you could use various data types, which are divided into two main groups, namely value types and reference types. The difference between them is quite simple – a variable of a value type directly contains data, while a variable of a reference type just stores a reference to data, which is located somewhere else.

Here’s an illustration of this:

Figure 1.1 – The difference between value and reference types

Figure 1.1 – The difference between value and reference types

As you can see, a variable of a value type (shown as A) stores its actual value directly in the stack memory, while a variable of a reference type only stores a reference here. The actual value is located in the heap memory. Therefore, it is possible to have two or more variables of a reference type that reference the same value, as indicated by the C and D boxes in the preceding figure.

Be careful – it is a simplification!

Please remember that...