SUMMARY

Arrays are an essential part of nearly every programming language, so you should expect that they will appear in some of your interview problems. In most languages, accessing an array is constant time if you have the index of the element you need, but linear time if you have only the value of the element but not the index. If you insert or delete in the middle of an array, you must move all the elements that follow to open or close the space. Static arrays are created with a fixed size; dynamic arrays grow as needed. Most languages support both types to a greater or lesser extent.

Strings are one of the most common applications of arrays. In C, a string is little more than an array of characters. In object-oriented languages, the array is typically hidden within a string object. String objects can be converted to and from character arrays; make sure you know how to do this in the languages you’ll be using because the operations required by programming problems are often...