Summary

In this chapter, we have discussed an important data structure, in other words, the heap data structure. We also discussed heap properties for min-heap and max-heap. We have seen the implementation of several operations that can be applied to the heap data structure, such as heapifying, and the insertion and deletion of a data element from the heap. We have also discussed two of the important applications of the heap—heap sort and a priority queue. The heap is an important data structure since it has many applications, such as sorting, selecting minimum and maximum values in a list, graph algorithms, and priority queues. Moreover, the heap can also be useful when we have to repeatedly remove a data object with the highest or lowest priority values.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the concepts of Hashing and Symbol Tables.