Advanced Topics in Computer Science
Unit 4: Stacks and Queues
Students study abstract data types that control access order: last-in-first-out stacks and first-in-first-out queues.
Unit Focus
What this unit is really teaching
The unit connects ADTs to practical applications like undo history, expression evaluation, simulations, and breadth-first search.
Key Topics
- +Stack ADT operations: push, pop, peek, and empty checks
- +Queue ADT operations: enqueue, dequeue, front, and circular buffers
- +Array-backed and linked implementations
- +Expression matching, postfix evaluation, and undo/redo workflows
- +Queue-based simulations and scheduling
- +Using queues as preparation for breadth-first graph traversal
Practice Work
Implementation and analysis tasks
Student task
Build a balanced-symbol checker and postfix expression evaluator.
Student task
Model a service line simulation using queues and runtime statistics.
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Work through the concepts, code, edge cases, and runtime analysis with 1:1 guidance.