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)

Hash tables

Let’s start with the first data structure, which is a hash table, also known as a hash map. It allows you to map keys to particular values. One of the most important assumptions of the hash table is the possibility of a very fast lookup for a value based on the key, which should be the O(1) operation.

Imagine a hash table or a dictionary

If you want to better imagine a hash table or a dictionary, it would be worth thinking about a collection containing a lot of data, where it is crucial to quickly check whether the dictionary contains a specific key, as well as quickly retrieve the value assigned to a given key. So, think about a system that allows you to determine which country a specific IP address comes from. As you know, there are many possible IP addresses, and your system must quickly obtain information from which country the user’s request comes to select the default language version of the application. This is how a hash table and dictionary...