The data structures project

Data structures are amongst the most fundamental ingredients in the recipe for efficient algorithms and good software design. Knowledge of how to create and design excellent data structures is an essential skill required in becoming an exemplary programmer. The goal of this repository is to provide a complete and thorough explanation of the most common data structures.

Contributing

This repository is contribution friendly 😃. If you're a data structures enthusiast (like me!) and want to add or improve a data structure your contribution is welcome! Please be sure to include tests 😘.

For developers

This project uses Gradle as a build system and for testing. To get started install the gradle command-line tool and run the build command to make sure you don't get any errors:

data-structures$ gradle build

Adding a new data structure

The procedure to add a new data structure named Foo is the following:

1. Create a new folder called Foo at the root of the repository.
2. Add data structure implementation in Foo/ as Foo/Foo.java
3. Add tests for Foo in Foo/tests/FooTest.java
4. Edit the build.gradle file and add Foo to the project.
5. Test your data structure thoroughly.
6. Send pull request for review 😮

Testing

This repository places a large emphasis on good testing practice to ensure that published data structures are bug free and high quality. Testing is done using a combinations of frameworks including: JUnit, Mockito and the Google Truth framework, but mostly JUnit.

When developing you likely do not want to run all tests but only a subset of them. For example, if you want to run the LinkedListTest.java file under LinkedList/tests/LinkedListTest.java you can execute:

data-structures$ gradle test --tests "LinkedListTest"

Sometimes there are many test files for one data structure. One example is the 🌲FenwickTree🌲 which currently has two test files: FenwickTreeRangeQueryPointUpdateTest.java and FenwickTreeRangeUpdatePointQueryTest.java, in which case you can specify a glob expression to capture all the appropriate test files:

# Using globbing:
gradle test --tests "FenwickTree*Test"

# Equivalently for the explicit:
gradle test --tests "FenwickTreeRangeQueryPointUpdateTest" --tests "FenwickTreeRangeUpdatePointQueryTest"

License

This repository is released under the MIT license. In short, this means you are free to use this software in any personal, open-source or commercial projects. Attribution is optional but appreciated.