Higher Education · Software Engineering
Data Structures
What is it
Data structures are the specific ways of organising and storing data to enable efficient access and modification — covering arrays, linked lists, stacks, queues, trees, hash tables, and graphs, along with the trade-offs between them.
Why it matters
Choosing the right data structure is often the single biggest factor in whether a program runs instantly or crawls — the same task can be near-instant with a hash table and painfully slow with a plain list, and recognising which structure fits which problem is a core professional skill.
Exam tip
For every data structure you learn, memorise the time complexity of its core operations (insert, delete, search, access) as a small table — exam and interview questions consistently hinge on knowing these trade-offs cold rather than reasoning them out from scratch each time.
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