A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

Implementing a Linked List

Let’s implement a linked list using Ruby. We’ll use two classes to implement this: Node and LinkedList. Let’s create the Node class first:

class Node

  attr_accessor :data, :next_node

  def initialize(data)
    @data = data
  end

end

The Node class has two attributes: data contains the value that the node is meant to hold, while next_node contains the link to the next node in the list. We can use this class as follows:

node_1 = Node.new("once")
node_2 = Node.new("upon")
node_1.next_node = node_2

node_3 = Node.new("a")
node_2.next_node = node_3

node_4 = Node.new("time")
node_3.next_node = node_4

With this code, we’ve created a list of four nodes that serve as a list ...