Chapter 3. What's in the Bag Anyway?

	The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.
	-- E. W. Dijkstra

In the previous chapter, we went over the installation of Visual Studio IDE, recursion constructs, and looked at a few basic examples of typical algorithms while implementing it using F#. In this chapter, we will cover built-in data structures: array, list, set, and map, and will present their typical use cases, especially around operations used mostly in functional programming. In this chapter, you will learn how to utilize built-in data structures, and will gain an improved ability to instinctively choose the appropriate data structure (mutable versus persistent) for specific tasks. You will also learn to use typical sorting algorithms (bubble, selection, merge) and towards the end, learn to see how the Big-O notation is used to choose between algorithms.

In this chapter, we will cover the following...