Introduction to Linked Lists

Welcome to the world of Linked Lists! In this lesson, we will dive into the concept of linked lists and explore their basic properties.

As a medium-level programmer in Python and C++, you may already be familiar with data structures like arrays. Linked lists provide an alternative way to store and manipulate data.

A linked list is a linear data structure consisting of a series of nodes. Each node contains a value, and a reference to the next node in the list. Unlike arrays, linked lists do not require contiguous memory and can dynamically grow or shrink as elements are added or removed.

To help you grasp the concept, let's take a basketball analogy. Imagine a team huddle, where each player holds hands with the player next to them. The player at the front is the head of the list, and the player at the back is the tail. Each player is a node, with their jersey number representing the value. The hand-holding represents the references, connecting the players together.

1class Node:
2    def __init__(self, value):
3        self.value = value
4        self.next = None
5
6# Creating nodes
7player1 = Node(24)
8player2 = Node(8)
9player3 = Node(23)
10
11# Linking the nodes
12player1.next = player2
13player2.next = player3