Book Image

C++ Data Structures and Algorithm Design Principles

By : John Carey, Anil Achary, Shreyans Doshi, Payas Rajan
Book Image

C++ Data Structures and Algorithm Design Principles

By: John Carey, Anil Achary, Shreyans Doshi, Payas Rajan

Overview of this book

C++ is a mature multi-paradigm programming language that enables you to write high-level code with a high degree of control over the hardware. Today, significant parts of software infrastructure, including databases, browsers, multimedia frameworks, and GUI toolkits, are written in C++. This book starts by introducing C++ data structures and how to store data using linked lists, arrays, stacks, and queues. In later chapters, the book explains the basic algorithm design paradigms, such as the greedy approach and the divide-and-conquer approach, which are used to solve a large variety of computational problems. Finally, you will learn the advanced technique of dynamic programming to develop optimized implementations of several algorithms discussed in the book. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to implement standard data structures and algorithms in efficient and scalable C++ 14 code.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Choosing the Right Approach

By now, it is probably apparent that there is rarely a single 'perfect' approach to implementing graph structures. The characteristics of the data we are representing, combined with the details of the problem we are trying to solve, can make certain approaches unreasonably inefficient, despite the fact that they may be perfectly acceptable under different sets of conditions.

Whenever you are trying to determine whether to use adjacency lists versus matrices, classes/structs versus simple arrays, Bellman-Ford versus Johnson's algorithm, BFS versus DFS, and so on, the final decision should be primarily dependent upon the specifics of the data and how you intend to use it. For example, if you want to find the shortest distances between every pair of nodes in a graph, Johnson's algorithm would be an excellent choice. However, if you only need to sporadically find the shortest distances for a single starting node, Johnson's algorithm would perform...