Chapter 7: Searching & Hashing

"Finding data is easy. Finding it fast is expensive."

🏛️ The Academic View

Binary Search is \(O(\log N)\). Hash Tables are \(O(1)\).

🏗️ The Engineering Reality

Binary Search requires sorted data (maintenance cost). Hash Tables require extra memory and good hash functions to avoid collisions (DDOS vulnerability).

Key Topics: * Leftmost/Rightmost Search: Handling duplicates in production data. * The Hash Map: Building a dictionary from scratch to understand collision resolution (Chaining vs. Open Addressing).