It seems impossible to talk about Big O without comparing sorting algorithms. I guess this is because every college course on the planet compares sorting algori

It seems impossible to talk about Big O without comparing sorting algorithms. I guess this is because every college course on the planet compares sorting algorithms for half the semester. If you have code which does a database query, parses some result and then generates HTML based on that; this is an algorithm. If your Javascript walks the DOM finding elements then that is an algorithm. These things all have associated computational costs which will scale depending on the input size.