Introduction to Custom Data Structures
Explore how custom data structures extend basic data structures to efficiently solve complex programming problems. Understand how to implement these with classes in languages like Python, Java, or C++. This lesson helps you identify when and how to customize data structures, enabling scalable solutions for real-world challenges such as web crawling, game state management, and cache implementation.
We'll cover the following...
About the pattern
Although many coding problems can be solved using existing data structures like arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, and hash tables, sometimes these structures may not perfectly fit the requirements of a given problem or may not provide the desired efficiency. This is where we need custom data structures. These structures can be implemented using basic data structures as building blocks and incorporate unique features or behaviors specific to the problem domain. In easier words, a custom data structure is the modified version of an existing data structure.
For example, we have to build a web crawler. It starts with a set of seed URLs, visits each page, finds ...