Review of Compact Data Structures - a practical approach by Gonzalo Navarro

Abstract

The book studies fundamental data structures and representations of combinatorial objects, including arrays, bitvectors, permutations, trees, graphs, etc. There are, of course, a great number of existing textbooks and lecture notes about data structures. The perspective of this book is, however, different from the usual presentations. In some sense, this book starts exactly where others leave off saying "we omit the low-level details of representation", and concerns itself mostly with the low-level representation. Specifically, it looks at how to organize and store data structures using as little space as possible while supporting efficient queries and operations. For the considered structures, the book explores the trade-off between reduced space and speed of operation. The analyses of the presented solutions go beyond the usual asymptotics, and also consider exact constant factors (particularly for the leading term of the space complexity); useful practical considerations are also discussed.