understanding data structures and algorithms algorithms and data structures are the most fundamental concepts in computing they are the building blocks from which complex software is built having an understanding of these foundation concepts is hugely important in software design and this involves the following three characteristicshow algorithms manipulate information contained within data structures how data is arranged in memory what the performance characteristics of particular data structures are in this bookwe will examine this topic from several perspectives firstlywe will look at the fundamentals of the python programming language from the perspective of data structures and algorithms secondlyit is important that we have the correct mathematical tools we need to understand some fundamental concepts of computer science and for this we need mathematics by taking heuristics approachdeveloping some guiding principles means thatin generalwe do not need any more than high school mathematics to understand the principles of these key ideas another important aspect is evaluation measuring an algorithms performance involves understanding how each increase in data size affects operations on that data when we are working on large datasets or real-time applicationsit is essential that our algorithms and structures are as efficient as they can be finallywe need sound experimental design strategy being able to conceptually translate real-world problem into the algorithms and data structures of programming language involves being able to understand the important elements of problem and methodology for mapping these elements to programming structures to give us some insight into algorithmic thinkinglet' consider real-world example imagine we are at an unfamiliar market and we are given the task of purchasing list of items we assume that the market is laid out randomlyand each vendor sells random subset of itemssome of which may be on our list our aim is to minimize the price we pay for each item as well as minimize the time spent at the market one way to approach this is to write an algorithm like the following[