Overview of supported operations

Now that we know what an individual node of a singly linked list looks like and how these individual nodes link up together to create a singly linked list, we can dive a bit deeper and understand the different operations that can be performed on it. 

Every data structure is essentially used to store, retrieve, and manipulate data efficiently. Users can perform these functionalities through a set of operations on the data structure. On a high level, there are three basic types of operations on any data structure.

• Traversal
• Insertion
• Deletion

All other complex operations can be implemented by mixing or piggybacking these fundamental operations. Let's examine some operations we can perform on a singly linked list.

Don’t worry if you don’t understand all of these operations yet. We will explore them in more detail later in the course. Each of these operations is built from a combination of basic ones, and once you’ve mastered the fundamentals, the intuition behind the more complex operations will become clear.