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)

Representations

At this point, you know what a graph is and when one can be used, but how can you represent one in the memory of a computer? There are two popular approaches to solve this problem, namely using an adjacency list and an adjacency matrix.

Adjacency list

The first approach requires you to extend the data of a node by specifying a list of its neighbors. Thus, you can easily get all the neighbors of a given node just by iterating through the adjacency list of a given node. Such a solution is space-efficient because you only store the data of adjacent edges. Let’s take a look at the diagram:

Figure 8.6 – Adjacency list representing an undirected and unweighted graph

Figure 8.6 – Adjacency list representing an undirected and unweighted graph

This example graph contains 8 nodes and 10 edges. For each node, a list of adjacent nodes (that is, neighbors) is created, as shown on the right-hand side of the diagram. For example, node 1 has two neighbors, namely nodes 2 and 3, while node 5 has four neighbors...