In the previous post on singly and doubly linked lists, recall that the collections last nodes next pointers were always NULL. This is because they had nothing to point to. But what if this is not what we wanted? What if when we get to the last node, we wanted to point the next pointer back to the head node, like a photo gallery application (when we get to the last picture, the next picture should be the first). This is where circular linked lists come from (they allow us to rotate through our collection). This means that circular linked lists have no end. One must be careful if they are going to iterate through the collection, or you could end up in an infinite loop. Read More
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Doubly Linked List
In the previous post, we talked about what data structures are. We learned that a linked list is a type of data structure, and we learned why they were important. We particularly looked at singly linked lists as a type of linked list, and we saw some of its usage and operations. Even though singly linked lists have their use in the real world, chances are you will find doubly linked lists easier to implement, more practical and have more real world use. One issue you might have noticed with singly linked lists is that it only has a reference to the next node (or next pointer). This makes it harder to find what the previous node is. We had to write some pretty length code just to find the previous node. The doubly linked list is a type of linked list that has a next and previous properties on the node (pointers), making it very easy to enumerate the node collections in any direction (forwards or backwards). This means we can navigate in both directions. Let us start from the top. Imagine you have a node collection with one node ( like we did from the previous post) Read More