Graph algorithms study guide: BFS, DFS, Dijkstra, Prim, Kruskal

How I organized the graph unit in my head. My own summary, not official material. Traversals - BFS: queue plus visited set. Visits in order of distance (edge count). - DFS: stack or recursion plus visited set. Goes deep before wide. Shortest paths - Dijkstra: priority queue by distance, non-negative weights. Minimum spanning trees (connect everything as cheaply as possible) - Prim: grow one tree outward, always taking the cheapest edge leaving it. - Kruskal: sort all edges, add each one unless it would create a cycle (use disjoint sets to check). Practice idea: draw one small weighted graph and run all five algorithms on it. Comparing the visit orders taught me more than any single problem did.