Don’t Understand Graphs? Here’s Why You Should Study Graphs in Computer Science

Graphs are everywhere, all around you! But chances are you don’t really understand them.

A directed, weighted, cyclic graph. A lot of jargon. Don’t worry, I’ll explain.

For many self-taught devs, graphs can be intimidating and difficult to learn.

For that matter, graphs can be baffling to experienced devs and computer science grads who haven’t worked with them for a while.

But graphs are cool and vital ways of representing information and relationships in the world around us. We can use graphs to do amazing stuff with computers, and graph algorithms offer a lot of tools to understand complex networks and relationships.

In this simple post, I’ll expose you to the basics of graphs. Nothing too fancy, complex, or mathematical here. Just the essentials. By the end, I hope you’ll see why they’re worth learning about and playing with.

A little motivation

Before we dive into the theory, I thought I’d provide some motivation for learning graphs in the first place. What are graphs and what can we do with them?

At its most basic, a graph is a group of dots connected by lines.

That’s the essential picture you need in your head. All the complicated notation you find in comp sci textbooks (e.g. G(V, E)) is simply…