121. Best Time to Buy and Sell Stock

 问题

Say you have an array for which the ith element is the price of a given stock on day i.

If you were only permitted to complete at most one transaction (i.e., buy one and sell one share of the stock), design an algorithm to find the maximum profit.

Note that you cannot sell a stock before you buy one.

Example 1:

Input: [7,1,5,3,6,4]
Output: 5
Explanation: Buy on day 2 (price = 1) and sell on day 5 (price = 6), profit = 6-1 = 5.
             Not 7-1 = 6, as selling price needs to be larger than buying price.

Example 2:

Input: [7,6,4,3,1]
Output: 0
Explanation: In this case, no transaction is done, i.e. max profit = 0.

分析

1 本题的买卖股票和之前做过的一道是不一样的，之前的是可以同一卖，然后再买。意思是无论你怎么走从1 到 5的最大距离就是4

  本题是在一个数组中找出后面比前面的值的差值最大的值是多少

2 time O(n2)的做法是两次遍历，第一次遍历到的值，第二次从这个值往后遍历，并且与这个值求差值，并且用一个变量来保存之前差值的最大值

   time O(n) 相当于两条线，一条线，还是保存差值最大的值，不同的是是与前边已经遍历的最小的值比较，因此只需要遍历一切就可以解决问题，需要做的是在遍历的时候保存下最小的值，nice

代码

if(prices == null || prices.length < 2) return 0;
        int profit = 0;
        int small = prices[0];
        for (int i = 1; i < prices.length; i++) {
            if(prices[i] - small > 0){
                profit = Math.max(profit, prices[i] - small);
            }else{
                small = prices[i];
            }
        }
        return profit;