In the last post we talked about Maps. We learned that Maps can be referred to as dictionaries, associative arrays, etc. Sometimes you will also hear Maps or Sets being referred to as a Hash ( You will hear  the likes of HashMaps or HashSets ). These types of key/value pair collections, are “Hash-bashed Data Structures”. What is hashing? In my very first post on data structures, i mentioned that Linked Lists are faster at adding data quicker to a collection, than it is at retrieving. Hashing is a way of storing data that makes retrieval and access extremely fast (Runtime complexity of O(1) for both retrieval, access, and deletion operations). Our collection is stored in a data structure known as a hash-table. This table is what makes data retrieval and storage so fast. When we looked at Maps in the last post (or even linked lists), anytime we wanted to find data, we had to traverse the whole collection in order to find it. Given a key, we would enumerate the whole thing for its value.Therefore it would take a long time we had a huge collection. Hash tables can be used to solve this problem. Read More