Summary

In this chapter, we learned how we should go about designing an application based on its requirements by choosing the way we want to store the data. We explained different types of operations that we can perform on data, which can be used as parameters for comparison between multiple data structures, based on the frequency of those operations. We learned that container adaptors provide a very useful way to indicate our intentions in the code. We saw that using more restrictive containers provided as adaptors, instead of using primary containers providing more functionality, is more effective in terms of maintainability, and also reduces human errors. We explained various data structures – std::array, std::vector, std::list, and std::forward_list, which are very frequent in any application development process, in detail and their interfaces provided by C++ by default. This helps us to write efficient code without reinventing the whole cycle and making the process a lot faster.

In this chapter, all the structures we saw are linear in a logical manner, that is, we can either go forward or backward from any element. In the next chapter, we'll explore problems that can't be solved easily with these structures and implement new types of structures to solve those problems.