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I am not sure if this question is odd topic or too broad, but I have been wondering about this for a long time, and I would very much appreciate any valuable inputs.

As a new grad student working on data structures (in this case, related to pattern matching literature), how would someone get through the huge amount of literature that needs to be covered? I have a reasonable understanding of basic data structures, but each time I open a research paper, there are heaps of new terms that I haven't heard before. In an effort to broaden my knowledge, I have been reading a few textbooks. For instance:

  1. Advanced data structures by Peter Brass
  2. Compact Data Structures A Practical Approach by Gonzalo Navarro (which is quite hard to get through)

Still, getting through the research papers seems like a never ending battle. What is a really good approach to get an overview of such huge volume of works done in the area?

Unni
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If you're looking for data structures at a graduate level, my suggestion would be Erik Demaine's online course materials for his class "Advanced Data Structures" (video lectures and notes) available through MIT Open Courseware at https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/electrical-engineering-and-computer-science/6-851-advanced-data-structures-spring-2012/

Unfortunately I don't think there is really a good textbook on this material at this level; for this reason, in my own graduate data structures course, I use a collection of Wikipedia readings instead.

David Eppstein
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  • Erik Demaine's lectures are exceptionally good. I have gone through some of the lectures from that course. Thanks a lot for the advice. – Unni Jan 11 '18 at 05:20
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If you are the kind of code and see for yourself kind of guy, you should probably start with this https://github.com/donnemartin/interactive-coding-challenges

I highly recommend the thesis mentioned in the comment https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rwh/theses/okasaki.pdf

Followed by Coling 2016 tutorial by Trevor Cohn on Succint Data Structures.

As a Detour, I would recommend the following thesis by O'Donnel, that takes a look in to Stochastic Memoization. http://www.socsci.uci.edu/~lpearl/colareadinggroup/readings/ODonnellEtAl2009_FragmentGrammars.pdf

Amrith Krishna
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