Demystifying Data Structures : Data Structures

This book is about functional algorithms and data structures. Algorithms and data structures are fundamentals of computer programming. I always enjoyed designing efficient algorithms. when I saw how powerful and creative pointer twiddling could be! Forexample reversing a singly linked list using three node pointers is a well known algorithm. We scan the list once and reverse it by changing the pointer fields of each node. The three pointer variables guide thereversal process. I have come across many such pointer tricks and have used them as needed. I was next initiated into the world of multi-threading! Variables became shared states between threads! My bagful of tricks was still valid; however changing state needed a lot of care to stay away from insidious threading bugs. The real world is never picture perfect and someone forgot to synchronize a data structure.. Immutable objects could be shared without worry among thousands of readers!