Day 8 Maps, Sets & Complexity

Today Brian taught us about Maps and Sets in Java. Maps are especially helpful in that they store key : value pairs. This will allow us to look up an item with a unique key. Brian mentioned that we will be using Maps quite a bit throughout the cohort.

We also learned about Sets. Sets have one main function: storing data without duplicates. We did an example where we took an array with duplicate items, added them to a Set, and printed the contents of the set. The result is that every duplicate value was ignored when added to the set. We’ll use this datatype whenever we specifically need to avoid duplicates.

Brian spent a little time on algorithm complexity. This is a computer science topic that we could apparently spend years studying so we only scratched the surface. The main lesson I took away is that algorithm complexity is important to ensure that a software application can execute efficiently at scale. Performance of our software is not necessarily measured by the speed of execution, but by the rate of change in that speed as the problem size increase.

Meetup:

Tonight I’m going to another meetup. This one is at Root, an insurance startup downtown. The topic is on data visualization and data strategies. My interest in Big Data is why I RSVP’d. More details tomorrow.