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I recently began working as a tutor with my college, helping younger students struggling in intro classes get their footing.

Many of my students particularly struggle with basic data structures (linked lists, heaps, binary [search] trees, hash tables, etc.); I'll call them DS's for short. I can often explain a DS where they make sense of it how it works (with a little help from Wikipedia). To further help them develop an understanding of these DS's, I'd like to provide simple examples for them to work through (think 3-layer binary search tree with 5-7 nodes), as well as some common applications of these data structures.

This leads me to my question. Do you know of a collection of basic data structure examples I could use for tutoring students? To clarify, I am not searching for implementations of these DS's, but specifically written/diagrammed problems of the common data structures such as the ones your professor might work through in lecture during the first two years in a university program.

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    $\begingroup$ Have you looked in the standard textbooks? $\endgroup$
    – Raphael
    Commented Feb 23, 2016 at 12:58
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    $\begingroup$ We've actually proposed a StackExchange site to specifically help with CS education questions like this one. Come support us here: area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/92460/… $\endgroup$
    – vk2015
    Commented Jun 9, 2016 at 14:44

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If you want diagrammatic material on data structures like binary search trees etc. then Introduction to Algorithms by C.L.R.S. (Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, and Clifford Stein) should do the job.

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If you want real-world examples of data structures in action, perhaps check out some not-too-large open source project that turns out interesting to your students and have them look for use of data structures. One possible example is micro emacs, the (tiny!) editor famous for being Linus Torvalds' favorite.

A collection of small, useful programs (for Unix, in C) showing all sorts of techniques (including data structures) is Kernighan and Pike's "Software Tools" (Addison Wesley, 1976). Dated, but still relevant. Or you might look at Noel Kalicharan "C by Example" (Cambridge University Press, 1994), which looks relevant (haven't seen it, Google let's me peek at it and it looks relevant).

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The Lempel-Ziv Encoding algorithm uses hashtable. It was my homework at college to write this algorithm to compress a text file.

I want to add that this is not a complete answer to your question. But you can find all these data structures if you search your everyday programs.

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