Creating a Binary Search in Python

Liam Pulsifer
Liam Pulsifer 8 Lessons 45m intermediate

Binary search is a classic algorithm in computer science. It often comes up in programming contests and technical interviews. Implementing binary search turns out to be a challenging task, even when you understand the concept. Unless you’re curious or have a specific assignment, you should always leverage existing libraries to do a binary search in Python or any other language.

In this course, you’ll learn how to:

  • Use the bisect module to do a binary search in Python
  • Implement a binary search in Python both recursively and iteratively
  • Recognize and fix defects in a binary search Python implementation
  • Analyze the time-space complexity of the binary search algorithm
  • Search even faster than binary search

This course assumes you’re a student or an intermediate programmer with an interest in algorithms and data structures. At the very least, you should be familiar with Python’s built-in data types, such as lists and tuples. In addition, some familiarity with recursion, classes, data classes, and lambdas will help you better understand the concepts you’ll see in this course.

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About Liam Pulsifer

Liam is a software engineer and avid Pythonista. When he's not writing code to automate all of his daily tasks, you can often find him running, playing basketball and tennis, reading, or eating good food.

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