Unordered Data Structures
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This is the 3rd course in the specialization, let’s put “trees” aside, there are way more important and powerful data structures await you. Hashing itself is a very interesting topic, you probably have seen it in other courses, say cryptography. However it won’t hurt, in the context of programming skills, to just treat hashing or hash table as some kind of “dictionary”. It also reminds of the essential difference between std::unordered_map (implemented as hash table) and std::map (self-balancing binary search tree).
The remaining of the course is all about graph data structure, before touching that, Disjoint Set and its implementation Uptree are introduced first. They are the prerequisite for building graph.
Understanding graph by reading books seems stunningly cumbersome, the beauty of this course is that it elaborates all essential things you need to know within just a few videos. You will learn basic concepts, a few options of implementation. After that it focuses on how to traverse a graph, the algorithms (Kruskal’s and Prim’s) to extract a minimum spanning tree, and finally the algorithms (the most celebrated one, Dijkstra’s) to find the shortest path.
Thanks to the professor, most of the concepts in videos are not hard to digest. However, implementing these concepts in C++ and complete the course assignments will cost you some time and effort.
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I am Kesler Zhu, thank you for visiting my website. Checkout more course reviews at https://KZHU.ai