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)

Tries

A tree is a powerful data structure that is used in various scenarios. One of them is related to processing strings, such as for autocomplete and spellchecker features that you certainly know from many systems. If you want to implement it in your application, you can benefit from another tree-based data structure, namely a trie. It is used to store strings and to perform prefix-based searching.

A trie is a tree with one root node, where each node represents a string and each edge indicates a character. A trie node contains references to the next nodes as an array with 26 elements, representing 26 chars from the alphabet (from a to z). When you go from the root to each node, you receive a string, which is either a saved word or its substring.

Why exactly 26 elements?

Here, we use 26 elements representing 26 chars because it is the exact number of basic characters between a and z in the alphabet, without any special characters existing in various languages. Of course,...