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)

Jagged arrays

The last variant of arrays to be described in this book is jagged arrays, also referred to as an array of arrays. It sounds complicated, but fortunately, it is very simple. A jagged array can be understood as a single-dimensional array, where each element is another array. Of course, such inner arrays can have different lengths or they can even be not initialized.

Imagine a jagged array

If you want to better imagine a jagged array, stop reading this book for a moment, open your calendar, and switch its view so that it presents the whole year. It contains 365 or 366 boxes, depending on the year. For each day, you have a different number of meetings. On some days, you have three meetings, while on others, only one or even zero. Your holidays are marked in the calendar and blocked for meetings. You can easily imagine an application of a jagged array in this case. Each day box is an element of this array and it contains an array with data of meetings organized on a...