This text provides a solid foundation in data structures with many Java examples, and outline programs for tutorial questions. The book is written for the Java 2 platform (as supported by JDK 1.2), as previous versions of Java had little inbuilt data structures, apart from the basic data types, such as numerical and character arrays. The book uses plain language in discussing key principles, and assumes only a small knowledge of programming, but not necessarily Java programming. The first part is a quick introduction to Java, and its essential components. A mathematical background is not assumed. Any mathematical concepts, such as set theory, will be well covered in an introductory section in the chapter in which they are used. This will help computing students who do not have a strong mathematical background. Many students struggle to understand how concepts are developed using a programming language, thus the text will give many practical Java examples.

Table of Contents

Introduction. Part 1: Java Functionality for Data Structure Manipulation. Objects and classes. Classes, constructors, method overloading, static methods, constants, garbage collection. Object-oriented design. Class libraries and arrays. Package statements, import statements, mathematical operations, arrays. Part 2: Data Structures. Data types vis a vis abstract data types. Single- and multi-dimensional arrays. Vectors. Matrix manipulation. Arrays of more than two dimensions. Strings. String abstract data type, Java string class. Introduction to sorting and searching. Outline of sort and search algorithms. Trees. Binary tree/binary search trees. Tree sort. Insertion, deletion, sorting and searching. B-trees. Stacks. Bounded stacks, unbounded stacks. Queues. Priority queues, circular queues, heaps, heapsort. Sets. Set theory, Boolean operations, practical implementation. Lists. One-way linked list, two-way linked list, bounded lists, Java list classes. Graphs. Adjacency matrices, graph algorithms, undirected graphs, directed graphs, minimum distance, topological sorting, implementations. Maps. Map theory, bounded maps. Dictionaries. Hash tables, ordered dictionaries and tables, indexing. Mapping functions. Part 3: Appendices. Appendix 1: Java basics for C and C++ users. Reversed words, data types, numbers and representations, variables, precedence, data type conversion. Object-oriented methodology. Selection and loops. Appendix 2: Applets and events. Appendix 3: Buttons, menus and exceptions, action listeners, radio buttons, pop-up menus, checkboxes. Appendix 4: Java reference. Appendix 5: Java collection classes.