Introduction to Linked Lists with Kotlin

Hello there! Today, we will explore Linked Lists, a core data structure crucial for organized data management and establishing relationships between data.

We will mark some essential milestones: an introduction to Linked Lists, their real-world applications, their implementation in Kotlin, and the different operations you can perform on them.

By the end of this lesson, you will be well-equipped to implement and operate Linked Lists in Kotlin. Let's get started!

A Linked List is a linear data structure similar to arrays. However, unlike arrays, they are not stored in contiguous memory locations. Each element in a Linked List is part of a node. A node comprises data and a reference (or link) to the next node in the sequence. This structure facilitates efficient insertions and deletions.

The head is also an essential concept in Linked Lists. It is the first node in the list and a reference to the entire list. The head is a null reference if the Linked List is empty.

Singly linked lists come up quite often in coding interviews. Interviewers from tech giants, start-ups, and just about every company testing your coding abilities will pose challenges based on this concept.

Here's another interesting point: While singly linked lists might not be extensively used in real-world applications, they form the foundational knowledge for understanding doubly linked lists, which are indeed quite common.

To begin implementing Linked Lists, we first need to understand the structure of a node, the building block of a Linked List. In Kotlin, we will use a data class to define a node.

A Node class mainly consists of data (the data you want to store) and next (the reference to the next node). In our case, we'll create a Node class to store integer data.

data class Node(var data: Int, var next: Node? = null)

Fantastic! You now know how to set up a node in a Linked List using Kotlin's concise syntax.

In this section, we'll learn how to add a new node at the end of our Linked List. We'll implement an append function in our LinkedList class for this.

class LinkedList {
    private var head: Node? = null

    fun append(data: Int) {
        val newNode = Node(data)

        if (head == null) {
            head = newNode
        } else {
            var last = head
            while (last?.next != null) {
                last = last.next
            }
            last?.next = newNode
        }
    }
}

The code checks if head is null, which would be the case for an empty list. If that's true, head is set to the new node, meaning this new node is the first and only node in the list. If the linked list is not empty (head is not null), we navigate to the end of the list using a while loop, and the new node is appended after the last node in the list.