Algorithms

Esse livro é muito completo e extremente didático a partir do uso de ilustrações e repleto de passo-a-passos.

The book teaches algorithms with a scientific approach and there is no magic everything is proved. The code is simple and elegant. The author has also online course explaining the book content.There is also community driven GitHub repo containing answers to all book’s exercises.The only thing that I didn’t like is the absence of unit tests.

Purchased the book for a university course, it contained lots of information, but felt like it didn't go into details. Was also a bit boring at times.

The book is about algorithms and data structures in Java, and not about learning to program. My review will contrast this book with Sedgewick's 25+year old "Algorithms in C++" in my shelf. The new algorithms book is such a vast improvement over the old C++ book that I hardly recognize it any more. The new Algorithms has two authors. The authors are using a sub-set of the Java OO features (unlike the C++ version, which used none). While I may not agree in detail with some choices, I can understand, because they explained their coding standards well, and why they limit features. The algorithms are updated to the basic algorithms a student these days needs to have heard of, which includes new material like tries. I was fascinated to see a regular expression evaluation automaton in code, with explanations. Some more esoteric material from the C++ book (for instance, Voronoi diagrams) is left for specialized books. At a few places in the book, the impact of algorithms and data structures is illustrated giving real-world examples. And I have yet to read chapter 6.But what really impressed me was the code. This book shows the fundamental data structures and algorithms in just a few lines of beautiful and well-thought code. Sure, any nit-picker may find quibbles, but most choices are understandable from a didactic and printing perspective. This code is so much better than any in the old C++ book. The authors preferred clarity, yet the code is still concise. The authors are clear about feature creep, and limit their code to what is needed and no more, though some extensions are part of the exercises. I am reminded of the Einstein paraphrase "As simple as possible, but no simpler".More complex data structures and algorithms need multiple code boxes, which are all explained in detail, with the box appearing close to the explanation. Some readers may take issue with the density of information in examples, but I find it advantageous to have all information close-by rather than spread out. I prefer to pore over their dense examples than having to flip pages.

I started reading "Algorithms" after Sedgewick and Wayne' s "Computer Science: An Interdisciplinary Approach," which I think is a great place to start for those who are new to (object-oriented) programming. This book, Algorithms, (and the Coursera course or the COS 226 at Princeton) builds your knowledge further by fleshing out the theory behind the data structures. I only made it through the first 3 chapters so far, but I think I became better at writing cleaner, concise, and correct code by reading this book and doing some coding assignments (of the Coursera course, which is based on this book and/or the course COS 226 at Princeton which uses this book). I like this book and the exercises because they provide a good mix of theory and practice. I feel like this book is great preparation for interviews, as well as for further study from books which use pseudo-code.The content itself is great, but I am deducting a point because of the print quality of the textbook. For some reason, a lot of the pages in my copy look grayer than they should. I'm not sure if it's a book formatting issue where the font color was set to gray accidentally or if it is a publisher issue, but for some pages the black text just doesn't appear as crisp and dark. I attached some pictures but my phone seems to color correct things and the difference in the photos doesn't seem big. In person, the variation in the black text throughout the book is definitely noticeable, though.