Chapter 6. Basic Sorting

Now that you understand some of the fundamental data structures used in today's software applications, you can use those data structures to organize the large amounts of data that your applications need to process. Sorting data into a logical order is a critical prerequisite for many of the algorithms in the chapters to come, and it is such a potential performance bottleneck that an enormous amount of research has been done over many decades to determine the most efficient way to sort various types of data. This chapter introduces three sorting algorithms that are easy to implement and are best suited to smaller sets of data, as their performance is O(N2). Chapter 7 covers more complex sorting algorithms with better performance characteristics for very large data sets.

This chapter discusses the following: