The bedrock of all data structures, memory is the underlying concept that you absolutely need to know in order to understand why data structures work the way they do.
- 1 bit is 0 or 1 - single pattern
- 2 bits is 00 or 01 or 11 or 10 - 4 pattern
- 3 bits is 000 , 0001, ... - 8 pattern
A byte is 8 bits. A byte considered as a unit of memory size. A single byte can represent upto 256 data values( 28)
An integer represented by fixed amount of bits. For example, a 32-bit integer is an integer representation by 32 bits(4 Bytes), and a 64-bit integer is an integer reprensentation by 64 bits (8 Bytes).
- Data stored in memory is stored in bytes and, by extension, bits.
- Bytes in memory can "point" to other bytes in memory, so as to store references to other data.
- The amount of memory that a machine has is bounded, making it valuable to limit how much memory an algorithm takes up.
- Accessing a byte or a fixed number of bytes (like 4 bytes or 8 bytes in the case of 32-bit and 64-bit integers) is an elementary operation, which can be loosely treated as a single unit of operational work.