Finding the Max Value in an Array

If you are given an array of number values and asked to write a function that returns the max value from that array, how would you do it? Well, I can’t be sure as to how you would do it, but I can walk you through what I did to solve this problem.

Let me start off by saying that this array will not include any negative numbers.

So we start with an array…

One Approach

Let’s also start by writing our function and passing in one parameter which will be used to pass in the array.

Now that we initiated our findMax function let’s start to think of what we can write inside of it. How can we begin solving for this? We know we have to iterate through the array so let’s set that up.

I wrote a for…of loop (introduced in ES2015) to iterate through the array and set num to be each value in the array. So as we iterate through each value in the array we will have to compare the current num value to the previous num value in the array to see what’s greater. The greater of the two values will have to be stored. We can set up a variable outside of the for…of loop for this. Let’s do that now…

The variable we created is called max and initialized with the value of -1. Why -1? As I mentioned before, we do not have to worry about the array including negative values, so therefore we can start with max being -1 and not worry about the first value in the array being less than it. This will make more sense in a moment. We now can set up an if statement within the for…of loop. This will allow our max variable to only be reassigned if the current num value is greater than what max currently is. Let’s set that up…

Let’s walkthrough what we have going on inside the function up to this point. For this walkthrough lets pass in the array [56,45,88] to our findMax function.

All we have to do now after the for…of loop is return max…

Another Approach

If we use JavaScript’s built in sort() method we can find the max value even easier. Also, even if all the values in the array were negative values this approach would still work. Our first approach would fail to work if that was the case.

Here is the approach #2…

So essentially we are using the sort method to first sort the array putting the max value as the last index in that array. Then we just return the last index of the array by whatever the length of the array is minus 1.

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