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)

Summary

This chapter focused on hash tables, dictionaries, and sets. All of these collections are interesting data structures that can be used in various scenarios during the development of many applications. By presenting such collections with detailed descriptions, performance explanations, and examples, you saw that choosing a proper data structure is not a trivial task and requires analyzing performance-related topics.

First, you learned how to use two variants of a hash table, namely non-generic and generic. The huge advantage of these is a very fast lookup for a value based on the key, which is the close O(1) operation. To achieve this goal, the hash function is used. Moreover, the sorted dictionary was introduced as an interesting solution to solve the problem of unsorted items in the collection and to keep keys sorted all the time.

Afterward, the high-performance solution to set operations was presented. A set can be understood as a collection of distinct objects without...