title: what does O(N) mean
body: <blockquote>
    <p><strong>Possible Duplicate:</strong><br>
    <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/133008/what-is-big-o-notation-do-you-use-it">What is Big O notation? Do you use it?</a>  </p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>Hi all,</p>
  
  <p>fairly basic scalability notation question.</p>
  
  <p>I recently recieved a comment on a post that my python ordered-list implimentation
  "but beware that your 'ordered set' implementation is O(N) for insertions"</p>
  
  <p>Which is great to know, but I'm not sure what this means.</p>
  
  <p>I've seen notation such as n(o) o(N), N(o-1) or N(o*o)</p>
  
  <p>what does the above notation refer to?</p>