Linked Lists... again... and again!

So far everything we've learned after recursion has close ties with recursion. Coincidence? Probably not. As the title suggests, linked lists are quite closely related to recursion, similar to trees. Initially, I did not understand the purpose of linked lists, what exactly was their purpose? But again, thinking back to an earlier lab we had done, it all became very clear. Thinking back to that lab, we needed to implement the Queue class in a way so that the time would not be dependent on the size of the queue, or in this case, list, since we were using a list to implement the Queue class. The answer to this is linked lists. A linked list contains a head node, which has the value, and the rest contains a reference to another linked list. This is similar to the nodes and references representation of trees that we learned not so long ago. My only real question about linked lists would have to be how they actually help to keep the running time constant? Since linked lists contain references to linked lists, it is obvious that it would be easy to insert and delete, since you are just removing that reference not the actual element. Looking into the matter, I found that with linked lists you start with space for just one element allocated (locating a block of unused memory of sufficient size). And then you can simply add on more elements without the need for copying or relocating, hence the reduction of time.

This week's lab proved to be quite challenging, most likely because of the lack of preparation, also in part due to the stress of the midterm. Since the lab proved to be challenging, it is clear perhaps the lab should be redone, and the notes on linked lists should be reread.
The midterm was quite fair, it wasn't too hard, or too easy.  And, although I studied quite a bit for a it, I found that I didn't do as well as I had hoped to do. This is a clear indication that next time I should prepare a study schedule in advance and instead of going over terminology, should do harder practice problems that will really require me to think.