Ask HN: Which project will teach me most about data structures and algorithms?

2 points·mettamage··3 comments

There are amazing data structures and algorithm courses out there. Many of these are mentioned in HN comments. However, as a person who feels more motivated doing an actual project (e.g. toy database, toy computer graphics engine or toy compiler) I wonder if anyone has a good suggestion for which project lends itself quite well for a data structures and algorithms course.

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Warning: There's a very large disparity between data structures in courses and in real life. From courses you can learn about the general ideas behind them. From successful projects you can learn how to implement them in cache-aware, low lock contention, space efficient way. It's a bit like learning about heat engines at school -vs- disassembling a modern computer-controlled-injection ICE.

If you really want to do that, check out almost any open source database. But I'd recommend starting from the courses.

I recommend "Cracking The Coding Interview" (https://amzn.to/2RjYkoG) for the beginning. It is a good starting point.

If your are familiar with PHP, you can checkout my library based on CTCI: https://github.com/doganoo/PHPAlgorithms

You seem to be looking for a project bigger than what I had in mind, but try implementing Bagwell's Hash-Array mapped trie. It's a fantastic immutable data structure every programming language should have access to.

Pick a language that can call on hardware implemented popcnt.

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