Introduction

This book is an introduction to the hash table data structure. When implemented and used appropriately, hash tables are exceptionally efficient data structures for representing sets and lookup tables. They provide constant time, low overhead, insertion, deletion, and lookup. This book assumes you are familiar with programming and the C programming language. The theoretical parts of the book also assume some familiarity with probability theory and algorithmic theory, but nothing beyond what you would learn in an introductory course.