DSA Quick Reference

This is a quick Data Structure and Algorithms reference guide with examples based on the Python 3 programming language.

If you have come here, you are probably preparing for an interview, or just want to review some material before participating to a coding competition. Either way, I hope you enjoy that collection of material and make good use of it.

I usually collect notes in a much more elegant way using my favorite pens, a Moleskin, drawing everything by hand. But if you have to travel, it can be useful to have everything available in one repository.

There are a lot of similar documents, some of them really complete, that you will find in the reference section. I know a question will arise in your mind: why bother writing another one. Well, I am a great fan of "review by doing it again" philosophy, and I encourage you of doing the same because you really understand something when you try to explain it to someone else.

Currently, this document is a work in progress and will soon reach a sufficient level of completeness, although the ultimate intention is to provide guidance for reviewing concepts you are already familiar with, so it will never be a comprehensive source of information.

For more information on the topics, I have found some books and courses that could be useful to you, and that you will find in the references section at the bottom.

Table Of Content

• Introduction
• Collections
  • Linear Data Structures
    • Linked lists
    • Stacks
    • Queues
    • Deques
    • Priority queues
  • Non Linear Data Structures
    • Trees
    • Binary Trees
    • Binary Search Trees (BST)
    • Tries
    • Heaps
    • Self balancing Trees
      • Red Black Trees
    • Maps and Hashing
      • Hashing
      • Maps
    • Graphs
• Algorithms
  • Binary Search
  • Sorting
    • Bubble Sort
    • Merge Sort
    • Quick Sort
  • Divide and Conquer
    • Median problem
    • Maximum Subarray Problem
  • Greedy Algorithms
    • Dijkstras
  • Dynamic Programming
    • Knapsack problem
    • Longest common sequence
    • A star

References

Here you will find some useful online courses, book and tutorials that can help you going deeper into some topic:

• Courses
  • Data Structures and Algorithms, ND256
  • Python Data Structures Tutorial, tutorialpoint
• Books
  • Algorithms, Sedgewick and Wayne, Addison Wesley, 2011
  • Python Data Structures and Algorithms, Baka, Packt, 2017
  • Competitive Programmer’s Handbook, Antti Laaksonen, Laaksonen, 2018
• Articles
  • Interviews - Everything you need to know to get the job, github
  • The 30-minute guide to rocking your next coding interview, freecodecamp, 2017