<aside> 💡 today’s topics: hash tables, heaps, tries
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<aside> ⚠️ #1 exam tip: learn how to “walk through” each data structure’s main functions:
<aside> 📘 hash tables are an associative data structure (as opposed to ordered data structures like arrays or linked lists)— it stores key-value pairs (think dictionaries in Python or objects in JavaScript)
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ideally…
we want to store key-value pairs, where given a key, we can access its value in $\approx O(1)$ time
we can’t just use a linked list of key-value pairs coz this would take $O(n)$ to search!!
under the hood, hash tables use: