when to use what in this general-purpose data structures special-purpose data in this we briefly summarize what we've learned so farwith an eye toward deciding what data structure or algorithm to use in particular situation this comes with the usual caveats of necessityit' very general every real-world situation is uniqueso what we say here may not be the right answer to your problem this is divided into these somewhat arbitrary sectionsgeneral-purpose data structuresarrayslinked liststreeshash tables specialized data structuresstacksqueuespriority queuesgraphs sortinginsertion sortshellsortquicksortmergesortheapsort graphsadjacency matrixadjacency list external storagesequential storageindexed filesb-treeshashing note for detailed information on these topicsrefer to the individual in this book general-purpose data structures if you need to store real-world data such as personnel recordsinventoriescontact listsor sales datayou need general-purpose data structure the structures of this type that we've discussed in this book are arrayslinked liststreesand hash tables we call these general-purpose data structures sorting graphs external storage