Thursday, 3 January 2013

Study Material on Data Structure

Data Structure
Data Structures and Algorithms
Data Structure Using C PDF
Data Structure Tutorial
Data Structures Notes
Data Structure Using C
Data Structure Book
Application of Queues
Types of Data Structures



In computer science, a data structure is a particular way of storing and organizing data in a computer so that it can be used efficiently.
Different kinds of data structures are suited to different kinds of applications, and some are highly specialized to specific tasks. For example, B-trees are particularly well-suited for implementation of databases, while compiler implementations usually use hash tables to look up identifiers.
Data structures provide a means to manage huge amounts of data efficiently, such as large databases and internet indexing services. Usually, efficient data structures are a key to designing efficient algorithms. Some formal design methods and programming languages emphasize data structures, rather than algorithms, as the key organizing factor in software design. Storing and retrieving can be carried out on data stored in both main memory and in secondary memory. Various Data Structures are available that are needed to be employed based on the need.


An array data structure stores a number of elements of the same type in a specific order. They are accessed using an integer to specify which element is required (although the elements may be of almost any type). Arrays may be fixed-length or expandable.
Record (also called tuple or struct) Records are among the simplest data structures. A record is a value that contains other values, typically in fixed number and sequence and typically indexed by names. The elements of records are usually called fields or members.
A hash or dictionary or map is a more flexible variation on a record, in which name-value pairs can be added and deleted freely.
Union. A union type definition will specify which of a number of permitted primitive types may be stored in its instances, e.g. "float or long integer". Contrast with a record, which could be defined to contain a float and an integer; whereas, in a union, there is only one value at a time.
A tagged union (also called a variant, variant record, discriminated union, or disjoint union) contains an additional field indicating its current type, for enhanced type safety.
A set is an abstract data structure that can store specific values, without any particular order, and no repeated values. Values themselves are not retrieved from sets, rather one tests a value for membership to obtain a boolean "in" or "not in".
An object contains a number of data fields, like a record, and also a number of program code fragments for accessing or modifying them. Data structures not containing code, like those above, are called plain old data structure.
Many others are possible, but they tend to be further variations and compounds of the above.

Data structures are generally based on the ability of a computer to fetch and store data at any place in its memory, specified by an address—a bit string that can be itself stored in memory and manipulated by the program. Thus the record and array data structures are based on computing the addresses of data items with arithmetic operations; while the linked data structures are based on storing addresses of data items within the structure itself. Many data structures use both principles, sometimes combined in non-trivial ways (as in XOR linking)
The implementation of a data structure usually requires writing a set of procedures that create and manipulate instances of that structure. The efficiency of a data structure cannot be analyzed separately from those operations. This observation motivates the theoretical concept of an abstract data type, a data structure that is defined indirectly by the operations that may be performed on it, and the mathematical properties of those operations


Data Structure Book,
Application of Queues,
Types of Data Structures,