Stacks and Queues: Selecting the Ideal Data Structure

There are a variety of ways for storing and managing data in your program and the choice of the right data structure has an effect on the readability of your code, ease of writing, and performance. Python has a wide selection of built-in mechanisms that meet most of your data structure needs. This course introduces you to three types of data structures: stacks, queues, and priority queues.


There are a variety of ways for storing and managing data in your program and the choice of the right data structure has an effect on the readability of your code, ease of writing, and performance. Python has a wide selection of built-in mechanisms that meet most of your data structure needs. This course introduces you to three types of data structures: stacks, queues, and priority queues.

There are multiple types and classes for all of these data structures and this course discusses them and provides information on how to choose the right one.

In this course you’ll learn about:

How stacks are defined with Last-In/First-Out (LIFO) semantics
How to use the collections.deque object
How concurrency will affect your choice
What are priority queues
Which data structure methods are thread safe
How to decide between all of implementations of these data structures
The course is the third part of an ongoing series, exploring how to find the right Data Structure for your projects. The first course is Dictionaries and Arrays: Selecting the Ideal Data Structure and the second course is Records and Sets: Selecting the Ideal Data Structure.