Data Structures and Algorithms in Python

Preface

The design and analysis of efficient data structures has long been recognized as a vital subject in computing and is part of the core curriculum of computer science and computer engineering undergraduate degrees. Data Structures and Algorithms in Python provides an introduction to data structures and algorithms, including their design, analysis, and implementation. This book is designed for use in a beginning-level data structures course, or in an intermediate-level introduction to algorithms course. We discuss its use for such courses in more detail later in this preface.

To promote the development of robust and reusable software, we have tried to take a consistent object-oriented viewpoint throughout this text. One of the main ideas of the object-oriented approach is that data should be presented as being encapsulated with the methods that access and modify them. That is, rather than simply viewing data as a collection of bytes and addresses, we think of data objects as instances of an abstract data type (ADT), which includes a repertoire of methods for performing operations on data objects of this type. We then emphasize that there may be several different implementation strategies for a particular ADT, and explore the relative pros and cons of these choices. We provide complete Python implementations for almost all data structures and algorithms discussed, and we introduce important object-oriented design patterns as means to organize those implementations into reusable ...