Think Data Structures

If you’re a student studying computer science or a software developer preparing for technical interviews, this practical book will help you learn and review some of the most important ideas in software engineering―data structures and algorithms―in a way that’s clearer, more concise, and more engaging than other materials.

By emphasizing practical knowledge and skills over theory, author Allen Downey shows you how to use data structures to implement efficient algorithms, and then analyze and measure their performance. You’ll explore the important classes in the Java collections framework (JCF), how they’re implemented, and how they’re expected to perform. Each chapter presents hands-on exercises supported by test code online.

• Use data structures such as lists and maps, and understand how they work
• Build an application that reads Wikipedia pages, parses the contents, and navigates the resulting data tree
• Analyze code to predict how fast it will run and how much memory it will require
• Write classes that implement the Map interface, using a hash table and binary search tree
• Build a simple web search engine with a crawler, an indexer that stores web page contents, and a retriever that returns user query results
• Other books by Allen Downey include Think Java, Think Python, Think Stats, and Think Bayes.

Table of Contents

1. Interfaces

2. Analysis of Algorithms

3. ArrayList

4. LinkedList

5. Doubly Linked List

6. Tree Traversal

7. Getting to Philosophy

8. Indexer

9. The Map Interface

10. Hashing

11. HashMap

12. TreeMap

13. Binary Search Tree

14. Persistence

15. Crawling Wikipedia

16. Boolean Search

17. Sorting

About the Author

Allen B. Downey is a Professor of Computer Science at Olin College of Engineering. He has taught at Wellesley College, Colby College, and U.C. Berkeley. He has a Ph.D. in Computer Science from U.C. Berkeley and Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees from MIT.