15. When to Use What
In This Chapter
• General-Purpose Data Structures
• Special-Purpose Data Structures
• Sorting
• Graphs
In this chapter we briefly summarize what we’ve learned so far, with an eye toward deciding what data structure or algorithm to use in a particular situation.
This chapter comes with the usual caveats. Of necessity, it’s very general. Every real-world situation is unique, so what we say here may not be the right answer to your problem. This chapter is divided into these somewhat arbitrary sections:
• General-purpose data structures: arrays, linked lists, trees, hash tables
• Specialized data structures: stacks, queues, priority queues, graphs
• Sorting: insertion sort, Shellsort, quicksort, mergesort, ...
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