Computer ScienceGeneralQuality 84 · Exceptional

Big-O Notation for Beginners

@author · 2026-08-13 · v1

7 min read

Big-O describes how runtime grows with input size.

O(1)

is constant (array access),

O(n)

is linear (looping once),

O(n^2)

is quadratic (nested loops),

O(\log n)

halves work each step (binary search). It ignores constants and lower terms:

O(2n + 5)

simplifies to

O(n)

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