How do I find sites?

[bosborne at VIOLET.BERKELEY.EDU]

To the Group,

I am a C beginner learning how to program on my NeXT (!). I thought a
useful program for me to attempt to make would find all restriction
sites in a sequence and print it. What sort of methods (structures, hash
tables, lookup tables, etc.) should I study? How does a program like
(the great) DNA Strider for the Mac perform this operation so quickly?
I donUt mean specifically, just the principles I should pay attention to.
As you can guess, IUm much more biologist than programmer

Thank you for your attention to this matter,

Brian O.