Structuring Data for Efficient Access and Manipulation

While binary represents the raw form, data structures are ways of organizing and storing collections of data in a computer’s memory to allow for efficient access and manipulation. The choice of data structure significantly impacts the performance of algorithms that operate on that data. Common Examples:

• Arrays: Ordered collections of elements stored in contiguous memory locations, allowing for fast access to elements by their index.
• Linked Lists: Collections of elements (nodes) where each element points to the next, allowing for dynamic resizing and efficient insertion/deletion.
• Trees: Hierarchical structures where data is organized in a parent-child relationship, useful for representing ordered data or relationships.
• Graphs: Collections of nodes connected by edges, used to represent relationships and networks.
• Hash Tables (Dictionaries): Structures that use a hash function to map keys to values, providing very fast average-case lookup.