Exercise 32: Double Linked Lists

The purpose of this book is to teach you how your computer really works, and included in that is how various data structures and algorithms function. Computers by themselves don't do a lot of useful processing. To make them do useful things, you need to structure the data and then organize the processing of these structures. Other programming languages either include libraries that implement all of these structures, or they have direct syntax for them. C makes you implement all of the data structures that you need yourself, which makes it the perfect language to learn how they actually work.

My goal is to help you do three things:

• Understand what's really going on in Python, Ruby, or JavaScript code like: data = {"name": "Zed"}
• Get even better at C code by using data structures to apply what you know to a set of solved problems.
• Learn a core set of data structures and algorithms so that you are better informed about what works best in certain situations.