Hash Maps

We’ve talked about arrays, linked lists, and other fundamental data structures. Now, we’re going to dive into hash maps, another essential data structure that every programmer should understand. Hash maps are incredibly efficient for storing and retrieving key-value pairs, making them essential for many programming tasks and complex algorithms. Let’s dive into what hash maps are, how they work under the hood, and their key operations and concepts! What is a hash map? Fundamentally, a hash map is an abstract data type (ADT) that stores key-value pairs where each key must be unique. The key can be of any data type that can be hashed (convertible via a hash function), and the value can be of any type. We will use an array to store the key-value pairs, and a hash function to convert the key into an index in the array. ...