Chapter 8
Crafting Elegant Code with Stacks and Queues

Until now, our discussion around data structures has focused primarily on how they affect the performance of various operations. However, having a variety of data structures in your programming arsenal allows you to create code that is simpler and easier to read.

In this chapter, you’re going to discover two new data structures: stacks and queues. The truth is that these two structures are not entirely new. They’re simply arrays with restrictions. Yet, these restrictions are exactly what make them so elegant.

More specifically, stacks and queues are elegant tools for handling temporary data. From operating system architecture to printing jobs to traversing data, stacks and queues serve as temporary containers that can be used to form beautiful algorithms.

Think of temporary data like the food orders in a diner. What each customer orders is important until the meal is made and delivered; then you throw the order slip away. You don’t need to keep that information around. Temporary data is information that doesn’t have any meaning after it’s processed, so you don’t need to keep it around. However, the order in which you process the data can be important—in the diner, you should ideally make each meal in the order in which it was requested. Stacks and queues allow you to handle data in order, and then get rid of it once you don’t need it anymore.