Introduction to Data Structures

Well organised data structures allow for quick and efficient retrieval of information and are essential for modern computing. Organised data can be easily sorted, ordered, and searched to retrieve information that meets certain requirements.

In Introduction to Data Structures, you’ll learn the fundamentals of creating data structures, and gain exposure to coding and visualising data structures. You’ll explore the importance and impact of well organised data.

You’ll learn how to build a program from small pieces and understand why organisational approaches make such a difference to some very common approaches to solutions.

The course identifies the most important and useful data structures in use in modern programming and each will be presented with exercises for building, visualising, and manipulating that structure. Each exercise embeds a simple and intuitive application for the particular organisation of data that we present. Through the course you will be given a concrete understanding of data structures by writing your own programs to interact with the data structures.

You’ll get the most from this course if you have some understanding of simple programming, and the Foundation week of the course will allow you to test the level of knowledge you require. Learners that have completed the Think. Create. Code. course will have sufficient coding skills to take this course.

What you'll learn

• Develop your programming language skills
• How to encode and make a working visualisation of objects and present on screen
• How to produce basic data structures such as linked lists, trees and graphs, as part of a simple graphical application