The Algorithm Design Manual

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Professor Skiena is also author of the popular Springer text, Programming Challenges: The Programming Contest Training Manual . While computers have speeded up enormously in the past ten years - and expensive supercomputers can speed things even more - a bit of thought might speed up a program by much higher factors (or you can avoid thinking altogether by stealing one of the tried-and-trusted algorithms in the guide). The second is a reference section, which includes a catalog of the 75 most important algorithmic problems. Megan Squire, Elon University, USA 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.

In comparison to "Introduction to Algorithms" (the other algorithm book I had significant exposure to) this one is faster to read, easier to digest and more tailored towards applications.This book is ideal for the working professional who uses algorithms on a daily basis and has need for a handy reference. One of Skiena's "war stories" tells of making a program run 30,000 times faster by using a better-designed algorithm. The second half of the book is collection of short essays on various kinds of problems and sketches of techniques to handle them.

With its aid, most programmers could go from writing code that merely works to writing code that is thousands of times more efficient and reliable: this book will earn some people fortunes. 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. But regardless, the reason for the 3 stars is that this book tries to straddle the middle of being a practical interview prep book and being a proof heavy, theoretical Algo book. The book builds a way of thinking towards solving algorithms problems, instead of just stating the algorithms and data structures in a mechanical way, but in many parts it is not very clear and you have to read a passage multiple times to understand what the author meant.The reader-friendly Algorithm Design Manual provides straightforward access to combinatorial algorithms technology, stressing design over analysis. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. It will not only serve as a valuable undergraduate textbook, but it will also become an irreplaceable reference guide for most professionals in the area. 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.