The official definitions of data structures are very vague. For example, Introduction to Algorithms defines a data structure as "A way to store and organize data in order to facilitate access and modifications." They're really about collections of data. How do we put multiple pieces of data in the same place in memory and make it efficient to retrieve them or do various operations on the collection? We'll discuss two illustrative examples: arrays and linked lists. We'll explain the tradeoffs between the two and provide some analogies for them that non-programmers can understand.

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