In this mini sprint, you'll be exploring the different data structures that were introduced in the lecture. The main point of this mini sprint is to give you some exposure to these structures from the perspective of users before you have to go and implement them yourself in the actual sprint.

This will mostly consist of you reading about these structures more in-depth, as well as interacting with them via their methods in order to get an understanding of what each method is doing. To that end, there are some great visualization tools out there on the internet that will help to give you a clear sense of how each data structure stores and retrieves pieces of data.

The primary part of this mini sprint should be spent exploring this visualization as well as this one. The first one is a binary search tree visualization. The second one is a graph visualizer. Play around with them, test out all of their different methods, and really try to think about how you would go about implementing these data structures along with their associated methods.

Here are a bunch of links to articles and sites that delve more deeply into the concepts we touched upon in the lecture:

http://blog.benoitvallon.com/data-structures-in-javascript/the-graph-data-structure/: This is a great blog post on graphs. The author goes into much more detail on the topic than we were able to in the lecture. He also provides a lot of sample code, as well as implementation details. The graph data structure is definitely the most difficult non-extra credit structure to implement, so if you need some guidance, feel free to reference this post. That being said, please do not just copy the code blindly. If you are going to reference this code, read through it first and do your best to understand it. Doing so is absolutely a great way to learn programming. Being able to parse someone else's code and to understand what it is doing is one of the most important skills a developer can nurture.

https://www.nczonline.net/blog/2009/06/09/computer-science-in-javascript-binary-search-tree-part-1/: Another great article, this one on binary search trees. This series is one of my favorites when it comes to talking about implementing data structures in the JavaScript language. It's a bit dated to be sure, but not obsolete by any means. Again, make sure to really try to understand the code instead of just blindly referencing it without understanding what it is doing.