Data Structure

A data structure is a defined way of organizing and storing data so that it can be accessed and changed efficiently, such as a list, a tree or a table of key and value pairs. Choosing the right data structure for a problem is often the decision that matters most for a program's performance, more than the choice of algorithm run on top of it, because the shape of the data determines which operations are fast and which are slow. Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, whose first volume, Fundamental Algorithms, appeared in 1968, gave the field one of its first systematic, mathematically rigorous surveys of data structures alongside the algorithms that operate on them.