Linked Lists in Detail with Python Examples: Single Linked Lists
Linked lists are one of the most commonly used data structures in any programming language. In this article, we will study linked lists in detail. We will see what are the different types of linked lists, how to traverse a linked list, how to insert and remove elements from a linked list, what are the different techniques to sort a linked list, how to reverse a linked list and so on.
After reading this article, you should be able to crack all the linked list interview questions.
What is a Linked List?
Before we study what are linked lists, let’s first briefly review how Arrays store data. In arrays, the data is stored at contiguous memory locations. For instance, if the first item in the array is stored at index 10 of the memory and is of size 15 bytes, the second item will be stored at index 10+15+1 = 26th index. Therefore, it is straight forward to traverse an array.
To find the third item in an array, you can simply use the starting index of the first item, plus the size of the first item, plus the size of the second item, plus 1.