Grokking Data Structures

Don’t be perplexed by data structures! This fun, friendly, and fully-illustrated guide makes it easy to learn useful data structures you’ll put to work every day.

Data structures are vital for shaping and handling all of the data an organization processes—that’s why they show up in so many IT interviews! But you don’t need to be a math expert to understand data structures. This book will prove it. You’ll discover the most common and most useful day-to-day data structures through fun examples, engaging industry stories, and hundreds of illustrations.

In Grokking Data Structures you’ll learn how to:

• Understand the most important and widely used data structures
• Identify use cases where data structures make the biggest difference
• Implement basic data collections like arrays, linked lists, stacks, and priority queues
• Speed up your searches using hash tables and hashing functions (while understanding their risks!)
• Use trees and binary search trees (BSTs) to organize data
• Use graphs to model and learn about complex data
• Reason about time and memory requirements of operations on data structures
• Pick the best data structure solution for a coding challenge
• Understand the tradeoffs of data structures and avoid catastrophes
• Write better code with the power of data structures

Grokking Data Structures carefully guides you from the most basic data structures like arrays or linked lists all the way to powerful structures like graphs. It’s perfect for beginners—and you won’t need anything more than high school math to get started. Each data structure you encounter comes with its own complete Python implementation so you can start experimenting with what you learn right away.

About the book

Grokking Data Structures makes it a breeze to learn even complex data structures. You’ll follow a steady learning path from absolute basics to advanced concepts, with fun cartoons and stories to make sure every structure sticks! Real-world examples show you how data structures are used in industry—such as making your searches faster with sorted arrays and binary search, handling your tasks list with a queue, and exploring multiple methods to handle triage in an emergency room. By the time you’ve finished reading, you’ll be able to spot when a data structure would help your code and know the perfect solution for the problem!

About the reader

For readers who know the basics of Python.

About the author

Marcello La Rocca is a research scientist and a full-stack engineer, who has contributed to creating large-scale web applications and machine learning infrastructure at Twitter, Microsoft, and Apple.