Like most of the self-taught programmers, I spent a lot of my years dabbling with different technologies. But there comes a time in every programmer's life when they have to learn data structures and algorithms to proceed in their careers. In this post I will go through the basics of data structures, what purpose they server and what's common between all of them.

If you think it’s slow, first prove it with a benchmark. Don't assume if things are slow. Benchmark it and see if they are really slow. Benchmarking is the way we check how fast our algorithm is for a given unit of the program. In benchmarking, we typically see how many iterations can a piece of code can run in a given time.