In programming, a data structure is a particular way of storing and manipulating the internal data of a computer program. There are many data structures, and you probably have used some of them.
For example, an array of int is a data structure that consume n entries in memory, where n is the size of the array. Each entry stores an int and can be accessed or modified via their index.
As the way to store and manipulate internal data mostly determines how much resources and time the application consumed to carry out its tasks, choosing an appropriate data structures can boost the performance of your program and, quite often, reduces implementation efforts.
Therefore, an important part of programming is to determine the right data structures for a given problem. In the coming articles, we will learn how to use and analyze common data structures in Java.
