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The "Linked List Exercise" Lesson is part of the full, Introduction to Data Structures for Interviews course featured in this preview video. Here's what you'd learn in this lesson:
Bianca explains the linked list exercise prompt, including the constructor(), insert(), remove(), contains(), and expectations for implementing the LinkedList class. Then, Bianca discusses the private variable's usage and constraints.
Transcript from the "Linked List Exercise" Lesson
[00:00:00]
>> Bianca Gandolfo: So the next one is a linked list, let's look at the different operations for a linked list.
>> Bianca Gandolfo: So here's our LinkedList class, again, we have a storage property. Again I can put an underscore there, to say that this is private, you shouldn't be interacting with it outside of this class.
[00:00:23]
And just to clarify on that, since this is inside of the class, you can interact with the _storage. But when you instantiate,
>> Bianca Gandolfo: Like this,
>> Bianca Gandolfo: When you instantiate, you don't later access storage.
>> Bianca Gandolfo: Okay, but inside here is fine. So the expectation is eventually to do all of these.
[00:01:06]
But initially, insertion, removal, and contains would be the main ones to work on. But being able to do all kinds of different things on a linked list is gonna help you on interviews. Because this is one of those ones where you don't use them in the day-to-day. And interviewers like to throw interesting,
[00:01:30]
>> Bianca Gandolfo: I don't know, interesting twists on this problem. So some things to think about insertion, is that it needs to be constant time. Removal can be constant time, if you have a reference to the node, or if you first need to search it, that's gonna be linear. So a contains is gonna be a linear-time operation, cuz you need to loop through all of the nodes.
[00:02:01]
IsHead should be constant time, IsTail should be constant time. I'm going to write these two in the notes, when I am done.
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