A hands-on, easy-to-comprehend guide that is perfect for anyone who needs to understand algorithms. With the explosive growth in the amount of data and the diversity of computing applications, efficient algorithms are needed now more than ever. Programming languages come and go, but the core of programming--algorithms and data structures--remains the same. Absolute Beginner's Guide to Algorithms is the fastest way to learn algorithms and data structures. Using helpful diagrams and fully annotated code samples in javascript, you will start with the basics and gradually go deeper and broader into all the techniques you need to organize your data. Programming is all about taking data and manipulating it in all sorts of interesting ways. Now, depending on what we are doing, our data needs to be represented in a form that makes it easy for us to actually use. This form is better known as a data structure. As we will see shortly, data structures give the data we are dealing with a heavy dose of organization and scaffolding. This makes manipulating our data easier and (often) more efficient.