What is a Sorting Algorithm?

In programming you often deal with collections of data which you might want to sort.

This could be to find the top or bottom n items of the collection. It could also be because specific operations (like binary search) only work on sorted collections.

A Sorting Algorithm achieves this with any ordering of data.

Why are there multiple?

We are always trying to be efficient in our code. That means that we want our sorting to be fast.

Different Sorting Algorithms perform differently when met with certain types of data. Some Algorithms are faster when the collection has many duplicates for example.

Each Algorithm has their own complexity dealing with it's speed and overhead.