data structures

The (concrete) data structures they absolutely must understand are these:

1) arrays - I'm talking about C-language and Java-language arrays: fixed-sized, indexed, contiguous structures whose elements are all of the same type, and whose elements can be accessed in constant time given their indices.

2) vectors - also known as "growable arrays" or ArrayLists. Need to know that they're objects that are backed by a fixed-size array, and that they resize themselves as necessary.

3) linked lists - lists made of nodes that contain a data item and a pointer/reference to the next (and possibly previous) node.

4) hashtables - amortized constant-time access data structures that map keys to values, and are backed by a real array in memory, with some form of collision handling for values that hash to the same location.

5) trees - data structures that consist of nodes with optional data elements and one or more child pointers/references, and possibly parent pointers, representing a heirarchical or ordered set of data elements.

6) graphs - data structures that represent arbitrary relationships between members of any data set, represented as networks of nodes and edges.

There are, to be sure, many other important data structures one should know about, but not knowing about the six listed above is inexcusable, and grounds for rejection in a phone screen.

 

• what you use them for (real-life examples)
• why you prefer them for those examples
• the operations they typically provide (e.g. insert, delete, find)
• the big-O performance of those operations (e.g. logarithmic, exponential)
• how you traverse them to visit all their elements, and what order they're visited in
• at least one typical implementation for the data structure