A Common-Sense Guide to Data Structures and Algorithms

So it turns out that for an array of five cells, the maximum number of steps that linear search would take is five. For an array of 500 cells, the maximum number of steps that linear search would take is 500. Another way of saying this is that for N cells in an array, linear search will take a maximum of N steps. In this context, N is just a variable that can be replaced by any number.