My favorite way of thinking about hash tables is by thinking about libraries and all of the books that they contain. If we think about some of the biggest libraries in the world and their collection of books, imagine how difficult it would be to find one single specific book in a collection of those unsorted books. All the libraries in the world have a great system of organizing and sorting through books.

You can think about all of the books in a library as a collection, or a dataset. In computer science, or in programming, the data sets that you have to deal with are generally pretty big. Being able to find one piece of data, just like finding one book on a bookshelf in a huge library of books, is a pretty common task. In this video, we'll go into how hash tables help us deal with these kinds of problems.

For more on hash tables, check out this accompanying post:

Taking Hash Tables Off The Shelf

Vaidehi Joshi ・ Apr 17 '17

#computerscience #programming #datastructures

I hope you enjoy! Feel free to continue the discussion in the comments.

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