Data Structures in Plain Language

Data Structures in Plain Language is an introductory book on data structures written by Cheng Jie, author of Design Patterns in Plain Language, following that series, and published by Tsinghua University Press in 2011. The book is built around a computer science teacher's classroom teaching, using everyday scenarios as analogies to explain abstract concepts in plain terms—for example, using "queuing for Spring Festival travel" to illustrate element insertion and "reserving consecutive seats" to analogize sequential storage—and it uses numerous diagrams to clarify the relationship between data structures and algorithms. The content advances according to the logic of a course: it first explains the basic concepts of data structures, logical and physical structures, and abstract data types, then introduces algorithms and the derivation of Big O time complexity; next it covers linear lists, stacks and queues, and strings, including naive pattern matching and the KMP algorithm; it then goes deeper into trees, covering preorder, inorder, and postorder traversal of binary trees, threaded binary trees, Huffman trees and their applications; the section on graphs explains depth-first and breadth-first traversal, minimum spanning trees, shortest paths, topological sorting, and critical paths; the search section covers static search methods such as binary search, interpolation search, and Fibonacci search, indexing techniques such as dense indexes, block indexes, and inverted indexes, as well as binary search trees, balanced binary trees, B-trees, and hash tables; the sorting section moves from bubble, selection, and insertion sort to Shell, heap, merge, and quick sort, analyzing classic algorithms line by line and comparing multiple algorithms side by side. The book uses C code for explanation and emphasizes "being able to understand and being able to write it," and the author says he polished it repeatedly from a beginner's perspective, which has made it a common reference for many university students and career changers learning data structures on their own. In 2020 the book came out in a full-color "Vivid Enhanced Edition," using color to distinguish diagrams and code anew and accompanied by animated courseware, for a better reading experience.