Harnessing Algorithmic Design and Data Structures in Structured Programming
When you're just starting in software development, the number of choices for breaking a problem into steps, what data to use, and which operations to perform can feel overwhelming. Structured programming gives us a roadmap: We divide an enormous task into smaller, well-defined modules, each with clear input, output, and responsibility. Algorithmic design and data structures are the engine and fuel of that roadmap: they guide how we organize our code and handle data so that our programs remain readable, maintainable, and efficient. Why Algorithms and Data Structures Matter Imagine you need to search for a name in a phonebook. If you flip through each page one by one, that's a linear search. It's slow but straightforward if the book (or the list of names in your program) gets huge. A better approach is binary search, which repeatedly cuts the search space in half; it runs in logarithmic time to handle millions of entries in a fraction of a second. This illustrates a core p...