Linked lists allow us to structure input data sets into elementary units by chopping the data-sets into its many individual elements that are stored in corresponding cells. Cells are all chained together into a single thread of cells, starting from the head to the tail. These chained cells can be manipulated dynamically by either adding or removing elements. These operations can be carried out efficiently (in constant time O(1)) by creating new cells or deleting some cells of the list. Linked lists are therefore preferred to arrays whenever we do not know a priori the input size. This is all the more interesting for sorting and searching operations that consider dynamic data sets in practice.
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© 2009 Springer-Verlag London
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Nielsen, F. (2009). Linked Lists. In: A Concise and Practical Introduction to Programming Algorithms in Java. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-339-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-339-6_7
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