During a Computer Science course, you’ll get a lot of education about data structures. They are a too broad field to be covered in this course (and I might create a dedicated course about them in the future!) but I will provide you a general introduction, just to know what they are all about.
Managing data is a complex problem. Especially organizing data in a way that’s efficient to store, and efficient to retrieve.
Sometimes the 2 things are not just compatible with each other, and depending on the application you need to create, you could choose one data structure over another.
Classic data structures are
- set
- stack
- queue
- struct
- union
- object
- array
- linked list
- binary tree
- graph
- hash table
- priority queue
- heap
You might recognize some names here, as I talked about some of these things before. For example objects and arrays are implemented for you in JavaScript.
Data structures are very important to build efficient systems, but you might not find yourself in the situation where you have to pick an efficient storage system for your data right now, when you have zero programming experience.
My courses focus on JavaScript. With a low level programming language like C, for example, you don’t really have a lot of choices, because the language is very.. primitive. And you need to learn data structures before you can write good code.
JavaScript is a higher level programming language, and you’re lucky that it can optimize things for you, without you having to do a lot of work.
As a beginning web developer you are not strictly required to jump into the complexity of data structures but I really encourage you to do so, when you’ll get better at your craft, even if they can take quite a bit of time to learn.