Data structures
Data structures are objects that you can use to store the information you're working on. Choosing the best implementation for how your data is used can have dramatic effects on the speed of execution. Here, we'll discuss some common and some more interesting data structures that you might like to make use of.
As this is a book about web application programming and not one on complex algorithm implementation or micro-optimization, we won't be going into a huge amount of detail on data structures and algorithms. As briefly mentioned in the introduction, other factors can dwarf the execution speed in a web context, and we assume you're not writing a game engine. However, good algorithms can help speed up applications, so, if you are working in an area where execution performance is important, you should read more about them.
We're more interested in the performance of the system as a whole, not necessarily the speed the code runs at. It is often more important to consider what...
