A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms, Second Edition, 2nd Edition

Implementing a Linked List

Some programming languages, such as Java, come with linked lists built into the language. However, many languages do not, and it’s fairly simple to implement them on our own.

Let’s create our own 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 node’s primary value (for example, the string "a"), 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_3 = Node.new("a"