August 2024
Intermediate to advanced
516 pages
11h 47m
English
Content preview from A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms in JavaScript, Volume 1
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Heaps vs. Ordered Arrays
Now that you know the efficiency of heaps, let’s see why it’s a great choice for implementing priority queues.
Here’s a side-by-side comparison of ordered arrays versus heaps:
Ordered Array | Heap | |
|---|---|---|
Insertion | O(N) | O(log N) |
Deletion | O(1) | O(log N) |
At first glance, it seems that it’s a wash. Ordered arrays are slower than heaps when it comes to insertion but faster than heaps for deletion.
However, heaps are considered to be the better choice, and here’s why.
While O(1) is extremely fast, O(log N) is still very fast. And O(N), by comparison, is slow. With this in mind, we can rewrite the earlier table this way:
Ordered Array | Heap | |
|---|---|---|
Insertion | Slow | Very fast |
Deletion | Extremely fast | Very fast |
In this light, it becomes clearer as to why the heap ...
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