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Introduction to Data Structures

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Imagine that you are hired by company XYZ to organize all of their records into a computer database. The first thing you are asked to do is create a database of names with all the company's management and employees. To start your work, you make a list of everyone in the company along with their position. Name Position Aaron Manager Charles VP George Employee Jack Employee Janet VP John President Kim Manager Larry Manager Martha Employee Patricia Employee Rick Secretary Sarah VP Susan Manager Thomas Employee Zack Employee But this list only shows one view of the company. You also want your database to represent the relationships between management and employees at XYZ. Although your list contains both name and position, it does not tell you which managers are responsible for which workers and so on. After thinking about the problem for a while, you decide that a tree diagram is a much better structure for showing the work relationships at XYZ. These two diagrams are examples of different data structures. In one of the data structures, your data is organized into a list. This is very useful for keeping the names of the employees in alphabetical order so that we can locate the employee's record very quickly. However, this structure is not very useful for showing the relationships between employees. A tree structure is much better suited for this purpose. Site Home In computer science, data structures are an important way of organizing information in a computer. Just like the diagrams above illustrate, there are many different data structures that programmers use to organize data in computers. Some data structures are similar to the tree diagram because they are good for representing relationships between data. Other structures are good for ordering data in a particular way like the list of employees. Each data structure has

unique properties that make it well suited to give a certain view of the data. During these lessons, you will learn how data structures are created inside a computer. You will find there is quite a difference between your mental picture of a data structure and the actual way a computer stores a data structure in memory. You will also discover that there are many different ways of creating the same data structure in a computer. These various approaches are tradeoffs that programmers must consider when writing software. Finally, you will see that each data structure has certain operations that naturally fit with the data structure. Often these operations are bundled with the data structure and together they are called a data type. By the end of this study, you should be able to do the following: Show how data structures are represented in the computer, Identify linear and nonlinear data structures, Manipulate data structures with basic operations, and Compare different implementations of the same data structure.