1 Introduction
In this chapter
- Welcome to this book!
- What are data structures?
- Why do you need data structures?
- Examples of data structures making a difference.
- Step-by-step guidelines to apply data structures in a project
Welcome to Grokking Data Structures
Welcome to this book! I’m super happy to be joining you on this journey through data structures.
Data structures make the world go round: Information is the gold of the Internet age, and data structures are necessary to handle and make sense of information. Data structures allow us to shape data in meaningful ways, and to query it to find what is relevant to us.
In this book, I want to dispel some misconceptions about data structures: they are extremely useful in your everyday work, even if you are not a researcher, they do make a difference, and they are not hard to learn: you do not need to be a math expert to understand and use data structures!
During our journey, I will show you that data structures are not boring theoretical stuff, but part of our lives, so much so that I can claim that you certainly use them regularly, without even realizing it. And not just for coding: you have used or seen in action some of the data structures we will describe in normal life situations.
Data structures are everywhere
You don’t believe me? We could make it interesting with a little bet, but that would be so unfair of me!