A friendly introduction to computational thinking, This is not your typical data structures book. Data Structures the Fun Way is an entertaining yet thorough introduction to building and using data structures. With the aid of numerous diagrams and humorous analogies, you'll find it painless, even fun, to learn how the structure of your data can make your programs more efficient and flexible. You'll use language-agnostic pseudocode to implement over 15 core data structures, ranging from simple variables and arrays to stacks, caches, Bloom filters, quadtrees, and graphs. You'll gain an intuitive understanding of how these structures work by exploring everyday yet whimsical examples like how to index the world's collectables, look up cartoon catchphrases, watch squirrels optimize for the scenic route, even how to find the closest cup of coffee (and jump the line to get it just a little bit faster). You'll also learn how to: Balance speed, flexibility, and memory usage to optimize computational performance, Design data structures to dynamically grow or shrink as needed, Combine simple data structures to perform advanced operations like tracking cache entries, mapping values with keys, and adapting node size to memory, Find and retrieve data in hash tables, and speed up searches with binary search trees, Improve search efficiency with B-trees and implement randomization to reduce the impact of bad data, You'll love how this delightful book applies data structures to practical examples to keep the lessons fun and to help you make sense of this often abstract topic. But first, coffee. Book jacket.