August 2017
Intermediate to advanced
222 pages
5h 3m
English
Content preview from A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and AlgorithmsBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
Chapter 11Node-Based Data Structures
For the next several chapters, we’re going to explore a variety of data structures that all build upon a single concept—the node. Node-based data structures offer new ways to organize and access data that provide a number of major performance advantages.
In this chapter, we’re going to explore the linked list, which is the simplest node-based data structure and the foundation for the future chapters. You’re also going to discover that linked lists seem almost identical to arrays, but come with their own set of trade-offs in efficiency that can give us a performance boost for certain situations.