August 2017
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 3m
English
Content preview from A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms
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Chapter 7Blazing Fast Lookup with Hash Tables
Imagine that you’re writing a program that allows customers to order food to go from a fast-food restaurant, and you’re implementing a menu of foods with their respective prices. You could, of course, use an array:
| | menu = [ ["french fries", 0.75], ["hamburger", 2.5], |
| | ["hot dog", 1.5], ["soda", 0.6] ] |
This array contains several subarrays, and each subarray contains two elements. The first element is a string representing the food on the menu, and the second element represents the price of that food.
As we learned in Chapter 2, Why Algorithms Matter, if this array were unordered, searching for the price of a given food would take O(N) steps since the computer would have to perform a linear ...