This best-selling book provides the conceptual tools to build file structures that can be quickly and efficiently accessed. It teaches good design judgment through an approach that puts the "hands-on" work of constructing and running programs at the center of the learning process. This third edition presents the practice of object-oriented design and programming with complete implementations in C++ of many of the file structures techniques, including direct access I/O, buffer packing and unpacking, indexing, cosequential processing, B-trees, and external hashing. By following the examples, students will gain a significant understanding of file structure techniques, and see how C++ can be made an effective software development tool. Every line of code in the book has been tested on a variety of C++ systems. In addition, the class definitions and bodies are collected together in appendices.
Michael J. Folk manages the Scientific Data Technologies Group of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana.