Hashing in Smalltalk: Theory and Practice

This volume, divided in two parts, provides a strong foundation for hashing, hash functions, and their application in the context of software development. While the programming language used in this book is Smalltalk, the information provided applies to other programming languages as well. The first part develops hashing and hash functions from first principles. The behavior characteristics required of hash functions are examined in detail. A thorough description of how hash functions are constructed follows, complete with a rich survey of existing hash functions. However, existing hash functions are often inappropriate for the task at hand. To address this problem, the second part shows how to build novel hash functions that are both efficient and highly effective for the range of data types that occur in practice. The book includes over 230 exercises. Together with their answers, provided in an appendix, these exercises further develop the material in both familiar and new ways.