What is the purpose of the first “node” in the declaration: “typedef struct node { - - - } Node;”?

Question

I am studying code examples from my professor in order to become better acquainted with linked data structures.

In our linked-list.c example the professor defines a

Answer 1

He is defining a temporary name for the node because he is using a well know technique to avoid writing struct node on the declaration of each struct object.

If he would just do:

struct node {
  int data;
  struct node *next;
};

you would have had to use:

struct node* node;

to declare a new node. And to avoid that you would have to define later:

typedef struct node Node;

in order to be able to declare objects like the following:

Node* node;

In the end:

typedef struct node {
  int data;
  struct node *next;
} Node;

Is just a shortcut for struct node { ... }; in addition to typedef struct node Node;.