Week 8 – Linked Structures

                This week in class we continued our discussion about linked structures. Especially linked lists and how they can be represented using the tree class. Linked structures are more efficient than regular python lists. If you have a data structure of millions of items, a linked structure is your best bet for efficiency and speed. If you were to remove the first item from a list of millions of elements, it would take very long for the process to complete. Whereas with a linked list, you just change the head and tail of the element you are wanting to remove. We were taught two different concepts in linked lists this week. They are both useful but different. The first method is as a list made up of an item (value) and the remaining list (rest). The second method was to represent it as objects (nodes) with a value and a reference to other similar objects. This week we used the second method. We learned about a wrapper class for linked list, insertion into the list, deletion, reversing and string representation. We almost created a binary search tree that represents data as a tree. You can search the tree very efficiently for an element.

               

                In class I enjoyed the binary search tree the most. Learning about new data structures always sparks an interest in me. The most challenging and frustrating part was in tutorials when we had to use a recursive algorithm to create the functions of the class. It took us a long time to figure out we had to use recursion. I feel confident with the lecture material but not the lab material. We got our test marks back. I was satisfied with mine even after a huge mistake on the final question.