Programming Pieces — Arrays

A series where I introduce concepts in programming ranging from data structures to algorithms to programming languages.

Welcome back to Programming Pieces! In the last part, which can be found here, we talked about Big O notation. I did mention the next part would be about recursion but I realized we haven’t talked about any data structures yet. What better way to introduce data structures than arrays and lists!

What are data structures?

Data structures are ways of organizing data types in a computer so that it can be used efficiently. In programming there are a lot of data structures and it’s a pretty important topic because not only are data structures a common interview question, it’s fundamental to understand how to organize your data. A few examples of data structures are:

• Stacks and Queues
• Linked Lists
• Binary Trees
• Matrices
• Hashes
• And many more

Deciding what type of data structure to use depends on your task and problem you’re trying to solve. In some cases it may be easier to use Stacks, Linked Lists might be beneficial in another. In this series we’ll definitely cover all of the above and possibly some of the more advanced topics.

What do we store in these data structures?

Inside of these data structures we store different data types. There are many different data types and this could range from language to language. The absolute basic data types you will encounter and have to manage are:

• Strings (text)
• Numbers (floating and integers)
• Boolean ( True or False)

These are some basic data types that you will encounter in your programming career. A good chunk or programming is trying to figure out how to efficiently store and retrieve this information. This is where arrays and lists come in, they are probably the simplest data structure you’ll encounter.

What are Arrays?

Arrays are a data structure that stores a collection of items at contiguous memory locations. The items that can be…