Welcome to the lesson! Today, our journey will ride through the captivating world of Complexity Analysis and techniques for optimization. These fundamental concepts are crucial for every programmer, especially those seeking to build efficient and scalable programs. Having a firm understanding of how code impacts system resources enables us to optimize it for better performance. Isn't it fascinating how we can tailor our code to be more efficient? So, buckle up and let's get started!
First things first, let's remind ourselves of what Complexity Analysis is. Simply put, Complexity Analysis is a way of determining how our data input size affects the performance of our program, most commonly in terms of time and space. In more technical terms, it’s a theoretical measure of the execution of an algorithm, particularly the time or memory needed, given the problem size n
, which is usually the number of items. Interested in how it works?
Let's take, for example, a linear search function that looks for a value x
in an array of size n
. In the worst-case scenario, the function has to traverse the entire array, thus taking time proportional to n
. We would say that this function has a time complexity of O(n)
.
