Classification of data structures
As you have seen while reading the book, there are many data structures with many configuration variants. Thus, choosing a proper data structure is not an easy task, which could have a significant impact on the performance of the developed solution. Even the topics mentioned in this book form quite a long list of described data structures. For this reason, it is a good idea to classify them in some way.
Within this chapter, the described data structures are grouped into linear and non-linear categories. Each element in a linear data structure can be logically adjacent to the following or the previous element. In the case of a nonlinear data structure, a single element can be logically adjacent to numerous others, not necessarily only one or two. They can be freely distributed throughout the memory.
Let's take a look at the following diagram, which shows the classification of data structures according to the mentioned criteria:
As you can see, the group of linear...
