Most important data structures in Java
Data structures are, as the name suggests, structures that store data. The purpose of a data structure is to hold your data in a manner that is easy to access and use. Data structures are part of a programming language’s core but are rarely discussed by those who don’t use them daily. In the right hands, however, they can make life much easier as they enable you to save time when it comes to writing code and let you focus on the more important aspects of your application(s). Data Structures have a lot of similarities across languages. So, for instance, if you are undergoing Data Structures and Algorithms Training In Hyderabad and your instructor is using some other language instead of JAVA, you can still apply the knowledge you will gain here. So let’s find out about the most important data structures used most often in Java:
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Linked List
A linked list is a linear data structure that represents a collection of items. Each item can be accessed by its unique position in the list. The data structure is commonly used for storing information about things that may move around the list, such as cars in an automobile inventory or people in an array of names.
Linked lists are often used to store lists of items and their positions, such as employee information from a database or products from an e-commerce site. They are useful for efficient searching and fast insertion and deletion operations because each item in the list has its location.
The key feature of a linked list is that it enables fast insertion and deletion operations because each element can be reached by its index number (or the next element). This makes it easy to insert new elements at any point in the list but also makes it impossible to insert another element between two existing elements without knowing how many elements are already there.
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Hash Table
Hash tables work on the principle of a key-value pair. The key is usually a string but can also be an integer or any other data type. The key is unique, whereas value isn’t
The hash table consists of two types of operations: insert and lookup. Inserting a new entry into the hash table requires finding an empty spot in the table for it, which means finding an available slot where there are no entries already defined. With this in mind, we will see how to create a hash table with some initial values.
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Array
The Best Java DSA Courses in Mumbai and elsewhere usually begin with an introduction to Array because of its importance. An array is a sequential collection of values. Hence they are a list of data items that are stored together and accessed using a single index.
In programming languages, an array is a list that holds a fixed number of elements. The elements can be of different data types, but the number and type of elements in an array must be fixed at compile time.
Arrays can store one or more values, and each value occupies a contiguous block of memory (the storage element). Arrays are mutable, which means they can be modified directly in place.
In many programming languages, arrays are defined using square brackets [ ]. This syntax is called “array notation”.An array can contain any number of different things — numbers, text, or images. They’re called arrays because they’re organized like rows and columns in a spreadsheet: each element occupies one row or column. The name “array” comes from Latin words meaning “to arrange.”