This part of the book contains four chapters of introductory material. Chapter 1, introduces the concepts of data structures and algorithms and presents reasons for using them. It also presents a few topics in software engineering that are applied throughout the rest of the book. Chapter 2, presents a number of topics on pointers. Pointers appear a great deal in this book, so this chapter serves as a refresher on the subject. Chapter 3, presents recursion, a popular technique used with many data structures and algorithms. Chapter 4, describes how to analyze algorithms. The techniques in this chapter are used to analyze algorithms throughout the book.