But before we discuss arrays let me tell you a very interesting story.

I have a DVD shop near my office that keep a very good collection of English movies. You can find movies on almost all genres e.g action movies, horror movies, romantic movies (hhhhh - ‘deep breath’), dramas, stage plays, religious movies and so on….

The shop-owner is not a very educated person but still he is able to manage the 20,000 plus DVDs very easily and he can take out the movie as soon as you say its name… hmm, the point is that how does he do that?

Well, I have analyzed his strategy and let me disclose this big secret to oraganize bunch of items with a special method to handle them easily.

He has categorized all the DVDs into different genres as we discussed above and also has given special IDs / codes / numbers to different shelves in his shop. He keeps the related movies in the same shelves. Each shelf is labeled after the category name e.g Romantic Movies, Horror Movies etc etc… Each DVD has a unique ID that can be used to track that DVD.

When a customer asks for a movie say Double Team, he quickly moves to the shelf labeled as Action Movies, then to the ROW labled as ‘D’ which means movies names starting with ‘D’ and then quickly reaches to the sequence of ‘D’ followed by ‘O’ and gets to the DOUBLE TEAM movie. And he memorizes the IDs of famous DVDs so when you ask him he will tell you pick the DVD # xxxx from shelf labeled by THIS NAME and you can directly pick it from there.