This week we covered topics like heaps and hashing tables. Although neither of these data structures were new to me, the finer aspects of hashing tables can always be elusive.
One topic that I spent some time on was loading factor, and how it is used in real life applications of hash tables. There is a tradeoff between the initial size of tables in memory and the loading factor, which determines how often rehashing will be required. Based on what I read about, it seems like it is beneficial to keep a load factor below .75.
Something else that I thought was interesting was the method to find the next largest prime. This was a piece of data required for the hashing algorithm we used, and it was difficult to find because most of the methods for finding prime numbers give you a list of prime numbers between n and 0.
ChompingTheBit 