the design and analysis of efficient data structures has long been recognized as vital subject in computing and is part of the core curriculum of computer science and computer engineering undergraduate degrees data structures and algorithms in python provides an introduction to data structures and algorithmsincluding their designanalysisand implementation this book is designed for use in beginninglevel data structures courseor in an intermediate-level introduction to algorithms course we discuss its use for such courses in more detail later in this preface to promote the development of robust and reusable softwarewe have tried to take consistent object-oriented viewpoint throughout this text one of the main ideas of the object-oriented approach is that data should be presented as being encapsulated with the methods that access and modify them that israther than simply viewing data as collection of bytes and addresseswe think of data objects as instances of an abstract data type (adt)which includes repertoire of methods for performing operations on data objects of this type we then emphasize that there may be several different implementation strategies for particular adtand explore the relative pros and cons of these choices we provide complete python implementations for almost all data structures and algorithms discussedand we introduce important object-oriented design patterns as means to organize those implementations into reusable components desired outcomes for readers of our book include thatthey have knowledge of the most common abstractions for data collections ( stacksqueuesliststreesmapsthey understand algorithmic strategies for producing efficient realizations of common data structures they can analyze algorithmic performanceboth theoretically and experimentallyand recognize common trade-offs between competing strategies they can wisely use existing data structures and algorithms found in modern programming language libraries they have experience working with concrete implementations for most foundational data structures and algorithms they can apply data structures and algorithms to solve complex problems in support of the last goalwe present many example applications of data structures throughout the bookincluding the processing of file systemsmatching of tags in structured formats such as htmlsimple cryptographytext frequency analysisautomated geometric layouthuffman codingdna sequence alignmentand search engine indexing