Stacks vs. Queues In JavaScript
What Are They & How Do We Code Them?
Queues and stacks are two common data structures leveraged on technical interviews. Due to the fact that they’re quite similar in structure, they can be a bit confusing to differentiate. So today we’ll build a stack and a queue in JavaScript.
Stacks
Stacks are data structures that follow the “last-in-first-out” or “LIFO” paradigm. We can think of them like a stack of books. In order to retrieve the third book in the stack, we have to take the fifth book off first, then the fourth book, until we retrieve the third book.
JavaScript doesn’t provide a native stack data structure, so we have to build our own with an array and a closure or a class.
Benefits
Stacks allow for constant-time adding and removing of an item. This is due to the fact that we don’t need to shift items around to add and remove them from the stack.
