Why are Data Structures and Algorithms so Important?

I often tell those I mentor that it is better you understand what you are doing than jump into doing what you are yet to understand – this would save you time, and resources, and make you more productive with less error-prone. As much that to learn how to code is not far-fetched on the internet but going about writing codes without a profound knowledge of data structures and algorithms will only present you as a monkey coder.

As computer scientists, software engineers or web developers, beyond the hype on the internet and the juicy salary, the primary thing expected of us is to perform operations on data, and basically, we perform the following three steps:

1. Take some input
2. Process the input data
3. Give the input back as output.

The input can be in any form, for example, while searching for directions on google maps, you give the starting point and the destination as input to Google maps, while logging in to your social media account (like Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, etc) you are to provide your email and password as input and so on.
Similarly, in the third step, the computer application gives us output in some form or the other.

To make this process efficient, we need to optimise all three steps. As you can guess, the most we can optimise is the 2nd step, which is where we have Data structures and algorithms.
Data structures refer to the way we organise information on our computers. With slight thinking, you can guess that the way we organise information can have a lot of impact on performance.

Take, for example, a library. Suppose, you want to have a book on Data Structure and/or Algorithm from a public library, to do that you have to first go to the computer science section, and then search the Data Structure and Algorithm (DSA) section. If these books are not organised in this manner and just distributed randomly then it will be a cumbersome process to find a book on Data Structure and Algorithm.
This is the way a librarian organises his books (Data) into a particular form (Data Structure) to efficiently perform a task like finding a book on What is Data Structure and/or What is Algorithm (Algorithm).

In this manner, we computer scientist process and look for the best way to organise the data we have, so it can be better processed based on the input provided.

I hope this is helpful! You can read my previous guides on Data Structure and Algorithm (DSA)

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