Absolute Beginner's Guide to Programming, Third Edition

Summary

The techniques you learned in this chapter will be useful throughout your entire programming career. Sorting and searching techniques are central routines in the data processing world. The computer, thanks to your programs, can do mundane tasks such as sorting a huge list of inventory values while you concentrate on less mundane jobs such as customer service.

• A typical counter and accumulator assignment updates the value of a total variable.

• A bubble sort makes several passes through the data, sending the small value of each pass to the top of the list.

• Nested loops control sorting routines by stepping through a list's values multiple times.

• A sequential search provides a simple searching algorithm, but a binary search is far more efficient. ...