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)

Dictionaries

The topic of Chapter 6, Dictionaries and Sets, was related to dictionaries and sets. First, let’s recap a dictionary, which allows mapping keys to values and performing fast lookups. A dictionary uses a hash function and can be understood as a collection of pairs, each consisting of a key and a value.

There are two built-in versions of a dictionary – non-generic (Hashtable) and generic (Dictionary). The sorted variant of a dictionary (SortedDictionary) is available, as well. All of them were described in detail.

The mechanism of a hash table is presented in the following illustration:

Figure 10.6 – Illustration of mapping keys to particular values

Figure 10.6 – Illustration of mapping keys to particular values

Due to the great performance of the hash table, such a data structure is frequently used in many real-world applications, such as for associative arrays, database indices, or cache systems. Within this book, you saw how to create a phone book to store entries where a person...