Problem Solving with Data Structures, First Edition is not a traditional data structures textbook that teaches concepts in an abstract, and often dry, context that focuses on data structures using numbers. Instead, this book takes a more creative approach that uses media and simulations (specifically, trees and linked lists of images and music), to make concepts more concrete, more relatable, and therefore much more motivating for students.   This book is appropriate for both majors and non-majors.  It provides an introduction to object-oriented programming in Java, arrays, linked lists, trees, stacks, queues, lists, maps, and heaps.  It also covers an existing simulation package (Greenfoot) and how to create continuous and discrete event simulations.

Table of Contents:
Contents iii   I Introduction to Java: Object-Oriented Programming for Modeling a World       1 Objects for Modeling a World        1.1 Making Representations of a World     1.2 Why Java?   2 Introduction to Java           2.1 What’s Java about?     2.2 Basic (Syntax) Rules of Java     2.3 Using Java to Model the World     2.4 Manipulating Pictures in Java     2.5 Exploring Sound in Java     2.6 Exploring Music in Java   3 Methods in Java: Manipulating Pictures         3.1 Reviewing Java Basics     3.2 Java is about Classes and Methods     3.3 Methods that return something: Compositing images     3.4 Creating classes that do something   4 Objects as Agents: Manipulating Turtles           4.1 Turtles: An Early Computational Object     4.2 Drawing with Turtles     4.3 Creating animations with turtles and frames     4.4 Making a Slow Moving Turtle with sleep and exceptions   5 Arrays: A Static Data Structure for Sounds         5.1 Manipulating Sampled Sounds     5.2 Inserting and Deleting in an Array     5.3 How Slow Does It Get?   II Introducing Linked Lists     6 Structuring Music using Linked Lists       6.1 JMusic and Imports     6.2 Making a Simple Song Object     6.3 Making a Song Something to Explore as a Linked List   7 Structuring Images using Linked Lists      7.1 Simple arrays of pictures     7.2 Listing the Pictures, Left-to-Right     7.3 Listing the Pictures, Layering     7.4 Reversing a List     7.5 Animation     7.6 Lists with Two Kinds of Elements   III Trees: Hierarchical Structures for Media   8 Trees of Images       8.1 Representing scenes with trees     8.2 Our First Scene Graph: Attack of the Killer Wolvies     8.3 The Classes in the SceneGraph     8.4 Building a scene graph     8.5 Implementing the Scene Graph     8.6 Exercises   9 Lists and Trees for Structuring Sounds         9.1 Composing with Sampled Sounds and Linked Lists: Recursive Traversals     9.2 Using Trees to Structure Sampled Sounds .   10 Generalizing Lists and Trees     10.1 Refactoring a General Linked List Node Class     10.2 Making a New Kind of List     10.3 The Uses and Characteristics of Arrays, Lists, and Trees     10.4 Binary Search Trees: Trees that are fast to search   11 Abstract Data Types: Separating the Meaning from the Implementation       11.1 Introducing Stacks     11.2 Introducing Queues     11.3 Using an ArrayList     11.4 Using a map ADT   12 Circular Linked Lists and Graphs: Lists and Trees That Loop     12.1 Making Sprite Animation with Circular Linked Lists     12.2 Generalizing a Circular Linked List     12.3 Graphs: Trees with Loops   13 User Interface Structures        13.1 A Toolkit for Building User Interfaces     13.2 Rendering of User Interfaces     13.3Creating an Interactive User Interface     13.4 Running from the Command Line   IV Simulations: Problem Solving with Data Structures   14 Using an Existing Simulation Package        14.1 Introducing Simulations     14.2 Overview of Greenfoot     14.3 Greenfoot Basics     14.4 Creating new classes     14.5 Breakout   15 Introducing UML and Continuous Simulations          15.1 Our First Model and Simulation: Wolves and Deer     15.2 Modeling in Objects     15.3 Implementing the Simulation Class     15.4 Implementing a Wolf     15.5 Implementing Deer     15.6 Implementing AgentNode     15.7 Extending the Simulation   16 Abstracting Simulations: Creating a Simulation Package     16.1 Creating a Generalized Simulation Package     16.2 Re-Making the Wolves and Deer with our Simulation Package     16.3 Making a Disease Propagation Simulation     16.4 Walking through the Simulation Package     16.5 Finally! Making Wildebeests and Villagers   17 Discrete Event Simulation        17.1 Describing a Marketplace     17.2 Differences between Continuous and Discrete Event Simulations     17.3 Different Kinds of Random     17.4 Ordering Events by Time     17.5 Implementing a Discrete Event Simulation     17.6 The Final Word: The Thin Line between Structure and Behavior   Index