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)

Stacks and Queues

So far, you learned a lot about arrays and lists. However, these structures are not the only ones available. Among others, there is also a group of more specialized data structures called limited access data structures.

What does this mean? To explain the name, let’s return to the topic of arrays for the moment, which belong to the group of random access data structures. The difference between them is only one word - that is, limited or random. As you already know, arrays allow you to store data and get access to various elements using indices. Thus, you can easily get the first, the middle, the nth, or the last element from an array. For this reason, it can be named a random access data structure.

However, what does limited mean? The answer is very simple. With a limited access data structure, you cannot access every element from the structure. Thus, the way of getting elements is strictly specified. For example, you can get only the first or the last...