Linked List Beginner Exercises

Here are some problems designed to help you practice manipulating linked lists. Each problem has two lines. The first line shows how the list starts. The second line shows how the linked list should end.

Your job is to write code that manually manipulates the given start list so it ends up like the end list.

You may create new nodes with Node.new(data)
You may create temporary variables to refer to nodes, like current = root or current = root.next
You may reassign the .next value of any node
Your solution will be in the format of several small lines of code manipulating the list.

Here are some example solutions to get you started.

Example 1

Add a node to an empty list

root -> nil
root -> 43 -> nil

Solution:

root = Node.new 43

Example 2

Add a node at the beginning of the list

root -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> nil
root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> nil

Solution:

node = Node.new 1
node.next = root
root = node

Problem 1

Add a node in the second place

root -> 1 -> 3 -> 4 -> nil
root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> nil

Problem 2

Add a node to the end

root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> nil
root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> 8 -> nil

Problem 3

Add a node second to the end

root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 8 -> nil
root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> 7 -> 8 -> nil

Problem 4

Delete the first node from the list.

root -> 1 -> 2 -> 3 -> nil
root -> 2 -> 3 -> nil

Problem 5

Delete everything from the list.

root -> 34 -> 45 -> 78
root -> nil

Problem 6

Manually stutter an existing list (make each item appear twice)

root -> 23 -> 17 -> 8 -> nil
root -> 23 -> 23 -> 17 -> 17 -> 8 -> 8 -> nil

Problem 7

Manually reverse an existing linked list

root -> 3 -> 4 -> 5 -> 6 -> nil
root -> 6 -> 5 -> 4 -> 3 -> nil

Iterating Over Linked Lists

Now that you're familiar with manually manipulating linked lists try to write methods that act generally on linked lists.

Contains

Write a method called contiains that accepts a linked list and a value. The method should iterate over the list and return true if the value exists as data at a node in the list, or otherwise return false.

def contains(ll, value)

end

Get Second-To-Last

Write a method that returns the second to last node in a list. You can assume the list has at least two element in it, or more. You can not assume you know the size of the list. You must use a while loop to iterate through the entire list and find out if a .next property on a node points to nil to find the end of the list.

def second_to_last(ll)

end

Beginner Exercises