I made a departure after studying binary search trees to visit priority queues and heaps. I had planned to do this one later, but it kept coming up in lectures. I really like heaps. They are space and operation efficient, easy to understand and code, and make sorting easy. What’s not to…
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As I mentioned a few days ago, I was putting things on hold for a bit to put together a quick little website that would let me create, manage, and memorize flash cards, so I can keep all this computer science info in my brain. The site it done! It’s very simple and was built…
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As I get deeper into my computer science studies, I’m learning about Endianness. More on this subject here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness Endianness is the ordering of octets in memory and ISAs (instruction set architecture), but not CPU registers. Big-endian stores the most…
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I have to take care of some things for my business for a couple of days. You do know I run my own startup full-time, right? I was in the middle of building my flash cards site. It’s almost done. I have all the card management working, so I now just need to do the actual memorization/testing…
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I’ve been studying for quite a while now, and even though I coded up data structures like crazy, I feel the knowledge fading. What I want is two special sets of flash cards: - general CS knowledge - vocabulary - definitions of processes - powers of 2 - design patterns - Big-O of…
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I’ve moved on to trees, and I have many trees to cover. The types of trees I’m studying: binary search tree: BST red/black tree splay trees AVL trees B-Trees: 2-3 (type of B-tree) Search Trees N-ary trees Tries Heap Binary Heap Disjoint Sets Priority Queue Here are a few code samples…
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This is a bit of a departure from data structures (which I’m in the middle of), but I wanted to cover Hamming Code and Error Checking since I had just covered bitwise operations. I’m really impressed with this marvel. If you don’t know, Hamming Code is a special way of laying out…
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I thought binary search was just good for sorted arrays, but this article on TopCoder was really good. It got me thinking of all sorts of ways to avoid a linear search when you know a search space has an inflection point that can be tested with a predicate. Here’s my humble implementations of…
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Bitwise operations are a very weak spot for me. ANDing, ORing, and XORing (huh?) bits hasn’t really been anything I can say I’ve needed to do, except for one company that used bitfields to save space. And << and >> have had little practical use for me. By the end of the day,…
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In my study of data structures, I’ve made it to hash tables. I’m spending a little extra time on this one, because there is some math and inherent gotchas in hashing and I want to fully understand. I may not get all the math, but I’ve got the important bits. In addition, hash…
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