Crash Course: Data Structures

Binary Search

Introduction

Binary Search is a type of search algorithm that returns the position of a target value within a sorted array. It does this by comparing the target value to the middle element of a sorted array.

Big-O Notation

The Big-O runtime of Binary Seach is O(log N).

Example

The algorithm searches for a target element by successively dividing a corrected array in half. In the example below, we are searching for the value of 13.

Coding Implementation

Iterative

Recursive