Think Data Structures: Algorithms and Information Retrieval in Java

If youíre a student studying computer science or a software developer preparing for technical interviews, this practical book will help you learn and review some of the most important ideas in software engineeringódata structures and algorithmsóin a way thatís clearer, more concise and more engaging than other materials.

By emphasizing practical knowledge and skills over theory, author Allen Downey shows you how to use data structures to implement efficient algorithms and then analyze and measure their performance. Youíll explore the important classes in the Java collections framework (JCF), how theyíre implemented and how theyíre expected to perform. Each chapter presents hands-on exercises supported by test code online.

Use data structures such as lists and maps and understand how they work

Build an application that reads Wikipedia pages, parses the contents and navigates the resulting data tree

Analyze code to predict how fast it will run and how much memory it will require

Write classes that implement the Map interface, using a hash table and binary search tree

Build a simple web search engine with a crawler, an indexer that stores web page contents and a retriever that returns user query results

Other books by Allen Downey include Think Java, Think Python, Think Stats and Think Bayes.