leila-alderman / linked-list

An implementation of the linked list data structure in Ruby

Linked Lists in Ruby

This project creates a Ruby LinkedList class to mimic the behavior of the linked list data structures found in other programming languages. This project is part of the The Odin Project curriculum.

A linked list is a linear collection of data elements, where each element contains some sort of data or value and a pointer to the next element in the list. In the list, "head" refers to the first element, and "tail" refers to the last element.

[ NODE (head) ] -> [ NODE ] -> [ NODE ] -> [ NODE (tail) ] -> nil

Along with the Node class, the LinkedList class contains the following functionality:

1. #append adds a new node to the end of the list.
2. #prepend adds a new node to the start of the list.
3. #size returns the total number of nodes in the list.
4. #head returns the first node in the list.
5. #tail returns the last node in the list.
6. #at(index) returns the node at the given index.
7. #pop removes the last element from the list.
8. #contains?(value) returns true if the passed in value is in the list and returns false otherwise.
9. #find(value) returns the index of the node containing the given value or nil if the value is not found.
10. #to_s represents the LinkedList object as a string so that they can be printed out and previewed in the console. The format of this string is, "( data ) -> ( data ) -> ( data ) -> nil".

Development versions

• Ruby 2.5.3
• RSpec 3.8

Using this code

1. Fork this repository on GitHub.
2. Clone your forked reposity onto your local computer.
3. To run the tests, cd into the main directory and then run rspec.