Sammie Bae
Hamilton, ON, Canada
Any source code or other supplementary material referenced by the author in this book is available to readers on GitHub via the books product page, located at www.apress.com/9781484239872 . For more detailed information, please visit www.apress.com/source-code .
ISBN 978-1-4842-3987-2 e-ISBN 978-1-4842-3988-9
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3988-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930417
Sammie Bae 2019
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Introduction
The motivation for writing this book was the lack of resources available about data structures and algorithms written in JavaScript. This was strange to me because today many of the job opportunities for software development require knowledge of JavaScript; it is the only language that can be used to write the entire stack, including the front-end, mobile (native and hybrid) platforms, and back-end. It is crucial for JavaScript developers to understand how data structures work and how to design algorithms to build applications.
Therefore, this book aims to teach data structure and algorithm concepts from computer science for JavaScript rather than for the more typical Java or C++. Because JavaScript follows the prototypal inheritance pattern, unlike Java and C++ (which follow the inheritance pattern), there are some changes in writing data structures in JavaScript. The classical inheritance pattern allows inheritance by creating a blueprint-like form that objects follow during inheritance. However, the prototypal inheritance pattern means copying the objects and changing their properties.
This book first covers fundamental mathematics for Big-O analysis and then lays out the basic JavaScript foundations, such as primitive objects and types. Then, this book covers implementations and algorithms for fundamental data structures such as linked lists, stacks, trees, heaps, and graphs. Finally, more advanced topics such as efficient string search algorithms, caching algorithms, and dynamic programming problems are explored in great detail.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Phil Nash, for the valuable feedback that helped me improve the technical content of this book with clear explanations and concise code.
Special thanks to the Apress team. This includes James Markham, Nancy Chen, Jade Scard, and Chris Nelson. Finally, I want to thank Steve Anglin for reaching out to me to publish with Apress.
About the Author and About the Technical Reviewer
About the Author
Sammie Bae
is a data engineer at Yelp and previously worked for the data platform engineering team at NVIDIA. He developed a deep interest in JavaScript during an internship at SMART Technologies (acquired by Foxconn), where he developed Node.js-based JavaScript APIs for serial port communication between electronic board drivers and a web application. Despite how relevant JavaScript is to the modern software engineering industry, currently no books besides this one teach algorithms and data structures using JavaScript. Sammie understands how difficult these computer science concepts are and aims to provide clear and concise explanations in this book.
About the Technical Reviewer
Phil Nash
is a developer evangelist for Twilio, serving developer communities in London and all over the world. He is a Ruby, JavaScript, and Swift developer; Google Developers Expert; blogger; speaker; and occasional brewer. He can be found hanging out at meetups and conferences, playing with new technologies and APIs, or writing open source code.
Sammie Bae 2019
Sammie Bae JavaScript Data Structures and Algorithms https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3988-9_1
1. Big-O Notation
O(1) is holy.
Hamid Tizhoosh
Before learning how to implement algorithms, you should understand how to analyze the effectiveness of them. This chapter will focus on the concept of Big-O notation for time and algorithmic space complexity analysis. By the end of this chapter, you will understand how to analyze an implementation of an algorithm with respect to both time (execution time) and space (memory consumed).
Big-O Notation Primer
The Big-O notation measures the worst-case complexity of an algorithm. In Big-O notation, n represents the number of inputs. The question asked with Big-O is the following: What will happen as n approaches infinity?
When you implement an algorithm, Big-O notation is important because it tells you how efficient the algorithm is. Figure shows some common Big-O notations.