Why Data Structures?

Hi everyone, Amitha again!. This post is to discuss about my research paper “Why Data Structures?”.

Let me explain the importance of data structures by a short story. Suppose there is a lake and you have to fill water for yourself. So your task is to carry required amount of water to home.

So how do you carry water?

There are three things available with you at the moment, a plate, a spoon, a pot.

First task will be choosing the right container to carry water. Among three, pot will be the best choice. If you think it's not sufficient, you can build a large container out of materials available near lake and carry month sufficient water. But lets consider pot as right container for this example to keep it simple, to reach home back soon. So we decided feasible container choice as pot.

So, if we considered above scenario, it's all about making right choice using our imagination and knowledge. Now it's time to relate it with Data structures and understand why they are useful.

Consider yourself as a program, your house as your project or application you are working on, lake water as data available from outside, containers as data structures which will be filled with data, filling the containers and transport as algorithm, time constraints for bringing water to home as time constraints for bringing data in required format.

Lets consider water molecule as unit data type,

Lake water is a collection of water molecules. Lets consider spoon as water molecule data type which can hold one molecule, plate as linear array data structure, pot as multi dimensional array data structure.

So pot seems to be a feasible solution which holds collection of molecules and the shape they took.

So, what I want to say is data structures are like containers or a toy for programmers to play with. Being a programmer, making the right decision regarding data structure is a very important skill in developing an application or application design or problem solving.

Data structures is one of my favorite subjects. This allure towards data structures drove me more into it and helped me to fortify the importance of data structures in the field of Computer Science. It took me ten days to perform a research in this specialization and two days to prepare the paper. I have gone through various data structures textbooks and some websites for guidance. My paper is published in the International Journal of Scientific Research and Engineering Trends (IJSRET), in Volume 07, Issue 03, May-June, Page 1404-1410.

Link to the paper

Here are the screenshots of the paper,