Java How to Program, Early Objects, 11th Edition

21.1 Introduction

This chapter shows how to build dynamic data structures that grow and shrink at execution time. Linked lists are collections of data items “linked up in a chain”—insertions and deletions can be made anywhere in a linked list. Stacks are important in compilers and operating systems; insertions and deletions are made only at one end of a stack—its top. Queues represent waiting lines; insertions are made at the back (also referred to as the tail) of a queue and deletions are made from the front (also referred to as the head). Binary trees facilitate high-speed searching and sorting of data, eliminating duplicate data items efficiently, representing file-system directories, compiling expressions into machine language and many other ...