Book Image

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By : Loiane Groner
Book Image

Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition

By: Loiane Groner

Overview of this book

This book begins by covering basics of the JavaScript language and introducing ECMAScript 7, before gradually moving on to the current implementations of ECMAScript 6. You will gain an in-depth knowledge of how hash tables and set data structure functions, as well as how trees and hash maps can be used to search files in a HD or represent a database. This book is an accessible route deeper into JavaScript. Graphs being one of the most complex data structures you’ll encounter, we’ll also give you a better understanding of why and how graphs are largely used in GPS navigation systems in social networks. Toward the end of the book, you’ll discover how all the theories presented by this book can be applied in real-world solutions while working on your own computer networks and Facebook searches.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Learning JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Why should we use arrays?


Let's consider that we need to store the average temperature of each month of the year of the city that we live in. We could use something similar to the following to store this information:

var averageTempJan = 31.9; 
var averageTempFeb = 35.3; 
var averageTempMar = 42.4; 
var averageTempApr = 52; 
var averageTempMay = 60.8; 

However, this is not the best approach. If we store the temperature for only one year, we could manage 12 variables. However, what if we need to store the average temperature for more than one year? Fortunately, this is why arrays were created, and we can easily represent the same information mentioned earlier as follows:

var averageTemp = [];
averageTemp[0] = 31.9; 
averageTemp[1] = 35.3; 
averageTemp[2] = 42.4; 
averageTemp[3] = 52; 
averageTemp[4] = 60.8; 
 

We can also represent the averageTemp array graphically: