A pivotal part of serious professional programming is the creation and manipulation of Data Structures. It is one thing to create a collection of variables that retain information about some real-world entity, an address or an inventory item. It is a far more complex and difficult challenge to manage an address book or inventory catalog. To accomplish these kinds of tasks “data structures” were invented.

This course is designed to introduce the concepts of Data Structures and demonstrate how they are implemented in both a procedural language © as well as an object-oriented language (C++).

The course is structured as follows:
- An on-line introductory lecture which includes a demonstration of code discussed in the lecture
- A skills mastery exercise which challenges the participants to apply the concepts diuscussed in the lecture. Submissions are graded Pass/Fail with minimal feedback provided where necessary
- A discussion group will be created permitting participants to continue to interact with the teacher and each other during the week as well as conveniently swap files etc.
- The course will end with a “Summary Exercise” challenging participants to apply everything they learned in the course, in a language of their choice (C, C++ or Java)

‘C’
- Building Blocks – Arrays & Pointers
- Structures
- Dynamic Arrays & Arrays of Pointers
- Single Linked Lists
- Double Linked Lists
- Data Hiding
‘C++’
- Transforming Structs to Classes
- Transforming Data Hiding to Class Access Rights
- Transformation of a Linked List to a cLink Class
- Introduction to Templates
- Adapting Templates to C++ Data Structures
Java
- Quick Introduction to Java ‘Data Structures’
Summary
- Summary Exercise

The ability to write simple programs in C/C++ and compile them. The course will focus on the concepts and code examples provided – NO assistance will be given in the use of a code editor, compiler (IDE). The ability to use these basic tools are the sole responsibility of the student.