tech-interview-handbook

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stack

Stack cheatsheet for coding interviews

Stack study guide for coding interviews, including practice questions, techniques, time complexity, and recommended resources

stack coding interview study guide

stack tips for coding interviews

stack practice questions

stack useful techniques

stack time complexity

stack recommended study resources

Stack

Introduction

A a stack is an abstract data type that supports the operations push (insert a new element on the top of the stack) and pop (remove and return the most recently added element, the element at the top of the stack). As an abstract data type, stacks can be implemented using arrays or singly linked lists.

This behavior is commonly called LIFO (last in, first out). The name "stack" for this type of structure comes from the analogy to a set of physical items stacked on top of each other.

Stacks are an important way of supporting nested or recursive function calls and is used to implement depth-first search. Depth-first search can be implemented using recursion or a manual stack.

Learning resources

Readings
- Stacks and Overflows, basecs
Videos
- Stacks, University of California San Diego

Implementations

Language	API
C++	`std::stack`
Java	`java.util.Stack`
Python	Simulated using List
JavaScript	Simulated using Array

Time complexity

Operation	Big-O
Top/Peek	O(1)
Push	O(1)
Pop	O(1)
isEmpty	O(1)
Search	O(n)

Corner cases

Empty stack. Popping from an empty stack
Stack with one item
Stack with two items

Recommended courses

import AlgorithmCourses from '../_courses/AlgorithmCourses.md'

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