Data Structures

Course Description

This page contains more information about Westhill's Advanced CS AB course. A grade of 4 or 5 on the AP CSA exam is required to take this course. To see Westhill's on-line materials for Advanced CS AB, click on the image to the left. The video, below, talks about AP CSA and how it compares to AP CSP. Starting in 2009, there is no longer an AP exam associated with this course. Westhill's version of the Advanced CS AB course contains some topics (such as regular expressions and other miscellaneous topics that were not part of the College Board's original curriculum. The following video describes the curriculum for this 2nd year college-level course.

Data Structures Overview

Topics Covered in Data Structures


Big-Oh: The course starts by teaching the basics of Big-Oh notation. This is the only purely theoretical concept taught in the course.



Java: The course teaches java topics not covered in AP CSA including additional operators and programming constructs.



Java Collections: Standard Java Library classes including Maps and Sets are heavily featured in the course.



Stacks: The course teaches how stacks can be used as a fundamental data structure to solve common programming problems.



Queues: The course teaches how queues and circular queues can be used as fundamental data structures to solve common programming problems.



Trees: Trees are the single, most important data structure taught in the course.



Sorting: As a continuation of what was taught in AP CSA, this course takes a deeper look into QuickSort and Heap Sort.



Hashing: Students are taught how hashing can be used to speed searching.



Functional Programming: Java version 8 adds functional features to the language which can greatly shorten code length.