Refresher: What is a data structure?

Data structures can be scary — a concept that feels like chicken-or-the-egg learning where making sense of one concept requires understanding another that itself requires understanding of the first. Mmm… circular.

A friendly definition of data structures from Harvard’s Introduction to Computer Science course reads: “Data structures are the more complex ways to organize data in memory, allowing us to store information in different layouts.”

Some examples of data structures are: arrays, associative arrays, records, linked lists, trees, tries, stacks and queues. What are the pros and cons of each? That’s above my pay grade (for now), ask Wikipedia. …