Data Structure is the most fundamental and building block concept in computer science. Good knowledge of data structures is must to design and develop an efficient software system.
Data structures can be defined as the process of collecting and organizing data in the best way. Here the operations on data are performed in an efficient way. Its functionality supports a specific purpose of accessing and performing operations in a given appropriate ways.
We deal with data all the time and how we store, organize and group our data matters. There are many examples from day to day life where organizing data in particular structure helps us. We are able to search a particular word quickly and efficiently in Dictionary because words in the dictionary are alphabetically sorted. What if the words in the dictionary were not sorted? It word be impractical and impossible to search for a word among million words. So, the dictionary is organized as sorted list of words. Another example, if we have a city map, the data like the position of landmark and road network connection all this data is organized in the form of geometric.
We show this map data in the form of these geometries in a two dimension plane.so, map data needs to be structured. By this, we can effectively search for a landmark get to see how to go from one place to another. Different kind of structure is needed to organize a different kind of data. Now, Computers work with all kind of data. Computer works with text, images, videos, relational data and pretty much any kind of data we have on this planet. How we store, organize and group data is important because computers deal with really large data and even with the computational power of machines if we do not use right kind of structures the right kind of logical structures then our software system will not be efficient.
There are mainly two types of data structures:-
1. Primary data structure.
Integer, float, Boolean, char, long, etc. are known as primitive data types. The concept of handling primitive data types in an efficient way is known as Primitive Data structure.
2. Abstract data structure.
When we talk about Abstract data model we just look at an abstract view of them, we just look from a high level what all features and what are operations define that data structures. In programming and businesses, we also have to use data types such as stack, linked list, graph, queue, tree, etc. These kinds of data types are known as complex data types. Abstract Data Structure is the technique or concept of handling the connected, complex, and large amount of data in an efficient way.
There are two types of Abstract data Structures:-
i) Stacks:-It is used to add or removes objects in a particular order. The element added first is removed at last. This is called LIFO (Last in First out).
ii) Queue:-Queue follows the order of inserting and removing called FIFO (First in First out).The element added first is removed first.
What is the need of Data structures in today’s world of technology?
There are different types of data structures where each of them is meant for some special task.
Data structures have gained its importance for the following reasons:
1. In software design, Data structures are known to be major factors for collection, storing and organizing of data rather than algorithms in some programming languages.
2. In almost every software system and program, Data structures are often included nowadays.
3. Often Data structures are used in the combination of algorithms. This allows the management of large amounts of data in an efficient way.
It is highly being used in the field of computer science and businesses.
