The Algorithm Design Manual

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This is very useful for gaining a broad overview of what tools are available, though the coverage can be somewhat brief (e. Throughout, the emphasis is on good problem modelling, which is essential to get an algorithm to work. It's been a great guide to actually thinking like a professional, even if most of the day job is data plumbing. This newly expanded and updated second edition of the best-selling classic continues to take the "mystery" out of designing algorithms, and analyzing their efficacy and efficiency. Clear explainers are interspersed with practical war stories, where Skiena explains how he applied the technique just discussed to solve a previously intractable problem.

It is really intended as a set of pointers to get you started on where to look up details for approaches to a particular problem, and in that respect succeeds quite well (and has a lot of up-to-date references). A lot of people might enjoy this, but I feel that having the mathematical understanding of algorithms and the proofs to back it up will greatly increase your understanding of the material. THE ALGORITHM DESIGN MANUAL comes with a CD-ROM that contains: * a complete hypertext version of the full printed book.

One of Skiena's "war stories" tells of making a program run 30,000 times faster by using a better-designed algorithm.

Expanding on the highly successful formula of the first edition, this book now serves as the primary textbook of choice for any algorithm design course while maintaining its status as the premier practical reference guide to algorithms. The book spends a lot of time emphasizing the utility of graph algorithms and how to model various classes of problems with them, as well as lot of time on dynamic programming and backtracking/enumeration. Professor Skiena is also author of the popular Springer text, Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual. Each of the topics is treated in a readable informal style with lots of asides and accounts of personal experiences - ‘war stories’ in implementing algorithms.Professor Skiena is also author of the popular Springer text, Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual . He is the author of four books, including "The Algorithm Design Manual" and "Calculated Bets: Computers, Gambling, and Mathematical Modeling to Win". Finding the fastest route from your home to your holiday in Wales might be satisfying, but a computer scientist would want to know how to find the best route from anywhere to anywhere. The fact that this book focuses on working source code in examples (as opposed to just pseudo-code) makes it extremely useful for drilling for programming interviews. The second is a reference section, which includes a catalog of the 75 most important algorithmic problems.

I also skipped all the problems in chapter 10, which dealt with NP hard problems and approximate algos and more proofy ones about reducing problems down to satisfiability. The text is very accessible to read and the pictures help to visualise and understand what's going on. For those who are new to the book, its main aim remains to provide a comprehensive catalogue of algorithms and background resources.

The second part, Resources , is intended for browsing and reference, and comprises the catalog of algorithmic resources, implementations and an extensive bibliography. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The extensive collections of problems at the end of each tutorial chapter provide excellent practice; in particular, the lists of "interview problems" for drilling are very valuable preparation.