Searching and Sorting

• In many situations, you need to search through the array to find a particular item.
• Sometimes it is helpful if the items are stored in some sorted order. It may not start that way, so you need to be able to put the data into order.

Thus it is important to know how to search through an array, and to sort an array. There are many standard algorithms for each of these.

We look at the two main searching algorithms:

• linear search
• binary search

Then we look at two of the many standard sorting algorithms:

• selection sort
• bubblesort
• (later in the course we will also look at merge sort)

After studying these algorithms, we look at how to compare algorithms, so you will be able to choose the best algorithm for each situation.