Customer Reviews

Algorithm Design: Foundations, Analysis, and Internet Examples

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

There are many good books with this title or similar ones. This is probably one of the better ones for your bookshelf and for use in academia. The examples are written in Java (a current language) and they are easy to read. The presentation is clean and illustrative. The authors have a good track record for expertise and papers published, and you get the sense that it is more real-world than most similar books.

Though I am a member of Amazon for years, and purchased many books, this is my first review about a book. It`s 2 am, and I am trying to understand the book`s questions, as a PhD student for hours. I took algorithms course before when I was getting my MS in a different university, where we were using Cormen & Leiserson`s book, I was liking this course and having no problems, I also watched all the MIT OCW`s lectures from Leiserson and the other young professor, and I can say I was totally comfortable with subjects. Algorithm was a course I was liking till I came across with that book.

However, this book became my nightmare with its ambiguities, poorly written sentences, ambiguous questions. I asked TA about some questions, and for every and every question I asked, she said `oh yes, this was not clear for other students too, so we thought this may be ...` And the hard part about questions are understanding the question, not solving it. This incidence happened in a 2nd tier(top 30) US university, in a graduate course.

What can I say? What is the reason and justification to write such a book?


I think, during my life I used over 40 textbooks, this one without doubt is in top 3 in worst text book lists (with Mark Weiss`s Data Structures, and Sedra& Smith`s microelectronics). I am giving two stars because they made at least a website, though I cant say its very helpful, they continue to being ambiguous even in the hints they say.

The book is so dull that, by just inspecting introduction which tells Archimed`s history (which became a cliche even in high school books and irrelevant to the introduction and algorithms in general) you can see this. Then look at Sedgewick`s introduction about an efficient algorithm finding prime numbers, Knuth`s introduction about roots of algorithm word etc...

I recommend Cormen`s or Sedgewick`s books, actually I cant imagine a worse book than that, if I had written something only that can be worser, but I am not claiming I am a good writer/author (as it can be seen from this review). I am sorry for writing such a harsh review, but my advice if you see a course offering this textbook, please refrain for taking the course for your good.

This book will take you from "programmer" to "engineer". Recommended to me by a Google engineer. You use her work everyday.

You need understanding of programming fundamentals to use this book. With that said, if you finish this book and the exercises, you'll be in the top ranks.

Easy to read and not quite as dense as CLRS Introduction to Algorithms.

It might just be me, but this book is horrible at explaning the topics it covers. If I was you, I'd go to wikipedia before ever going to this book.

After researching a variety of alternatives, I settled upon using Algorithm Design by Goodrich and Tamassia to teach a junior-level algorithms course and the experience has been quite positive.

While instructor material grows a bit sparse in the last half or third of the book, it's still quite useful. The slides are great and many of the problems have solutions available. Moreover, the solutions tend to be correct (I've only found two mistakes, which may be covered in the up-to-date errata).

The layout of the sections and chapters is quite natural and easy to adapt to your own course, although the last third of the book is essentially an assortment of topics that didn't fit in anywhere else. I would advise bringing some of those topics in to the course early on as diversions from the main material, which admittedly can get a little dry.

For the most part, the book is well written with interesting and adequete end of chapter problems. There are relatively few Java-based examples, but we skipped over them anyhow -- the pseudo-code is quite acceptable. Goodrich and Tamassia give a broad survey of topics, but cover them in enough depth and with enough rigor for an undergraduate course where CLR(S) would be overkill. I recommend it.

I am currently using this book in a course on Algorithm Design and i must say that this is easily one of the worst text books i have every come across.

At times it feels that the authors are vague or overfly complex simply for the purpose of feeling good about themselves that they could take a very simple subject and twist it upside down and make it complicated.

I'm doing quite well in the course but that is in big part due to my resourcefulness and looking at other places for reference and assistance instead of turning to this text.

I think that the most important part of the course is the introduction of the N-NP problems. While reading this section i kept falling back to what Richard Fynman has said about teaching, "If you can't explain a concept to a freshman, you really don't understand the concept". This about summarizes how I feel about the author's of this book, they don't get the concept.

I've come across worse books than this, so i can't give it a 1-star rating, but there are PLENTY of books that are much better than this one, so i suggest you look elsewhere.

This book is horrible. It doesn't explain anything properly. Do yourself a favor and buy a different book.

It is great as a textbook to learn about algorithms.
The book emphasizes on writing pseudo-code for algorithms. There is a rich number of sorting, searching algorithms, along with popular abstract data structures. The part about graph theory is especially good when accompanied by the Power point.

For reference, other books may be better because this book has much introductory content.

I'm a grad. student using this book, and understanding the written language amounts to same sensation as you would get during root canal. While examples are concise, pseudo-code is excellent, despite the few actual examples in Java, it covers vast range of topics rather well. But for crying out loud, hire an editor for the next edition that will break down paragraph long sentences and introduce some readability to the text! For that reason I tend to gravitate to my undergrad books for my current studies.

I would not consider this book as the ultimate book for algorithms as the title suggests. :-) However, it is a very readable book, and filled with brief, but concise observations. Do not get me wrong. This book also has very detailed explanations of fundamental data structures and algorithms.

Also, the best part of the book is that it lists good references for further readings. I loved this book. I would suggest this book to others. Math hints at the back of the books are useful, and some excercises are quite brain challenging. I think it is a great practice for students, but it is not so fun when students get it for assignments. :-)