Data Structure is a way of collecting and organizing data in such a way that we can perform operations on these data in an effective way. Data Structures is about rendering data elements in terms of some relationship, for better organization and storage. For example, we have data player’s name “Virat” and age 26. Here “Virat” is of String data type and 26 is of integer data type.
We can organize this data into a record like Player record. Now we can collect and store player’s records in a file or database as a data structure. For example “Dhoni” 30, “Gambhir” 31, “Sehwag” 33
In simple language, Data Structures are structures programmed to store ordered data, so that various operations can be performed on it easily.
Basic types of Data Structures
As we discussed above, anything that can store data can be called as a data structure, hence Integer, Float, Boolean, Char etc, all are data structures. They are known as Primitive Data Structures.
Then we also have some complex Data Structures, which are used to store large and connected data. Some example of Abstract Data Structure is:
- Linked List
- Tree
- Graph
- Stack, Queue etc.
All these data structures allow us to perform different operations on data. We select these data structures based on which type of operation is required. We will look into these data structures in more details in our later lessons.
