Customer Reviews

Computer Algorithms: Introduction to Design and Analysis (3rd Edition)

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

This is one of two books I must say sorry to. I hope readers may find my words helpful. I must say this is a poor book, although I feel the authors did put efforts to make it nice.

There are a lot of classical and excellent books on this subject. But here's the reason my department chose it as our textbook: Because the other books are relatively hard and deep for the students.

But here is the response from the studnets at the end of the semester, no matter it is an A student or C student: They hate this book, since they can not get much information after spending hours and hours on it. And they eventually found those "harder" books in lib, and loved them. The key reason is, those books explained everything clearly. (In almost the same number of pages.)

The key problem as I see is, the authors just understood the materials in a certain way, but not thoroughly, and not able to explain it in a clear way. Only a person who has already know all the stuff can figure out what are the authors talking about in some part of the book.

Now I believe, in order to write a good textbook for students, at least you should be a master in this area.

If some of my words hurts, I am sorry. But I am talking about my feeling and most students' feeling.

I'm a 4th year undergraduate student in computer science and I just finished the Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms course that was based on this book.

I thought the book was horrible. It did little to help me understand anything but general ideas. Reading this book is like reading a volume of mathematical proofs. The authors speak in symbols.

What makes it much worse is that every page makes multiple references to other portions of the text that aren't on the facing pages. They might be one page turn away, but very often they are a few pages, or even chapters away!

The only reason I would keep this book is for the list of topics it covers.

The second edition was arguably the best undergraduate text on algorithms. But unfortunately the 3rd (current) edition is a major disappointment. On the positive side, the coverage of graph algorithms was expanded; on the negative side, is everything else! The explanations are consistently worse than in the second edition. The description and explanation of Quicksort is particularly bad, in fact it's so horrible it should be ripped out of the book and thrown away. About the only use the book now has is as a source of exercises for professors to assign to their students -- fortunately, the exercises are almost entirely the same as in the second edition and are still the best set in any algorithms text.

I have only one thing to say to the author; if it ain't broke, don't fix it!

I am a CS major and I was required to get this book for my Algorithms class, I wasn't too dissapointed with it but I didn't see much in it either. The major flaw is this book would have to be the code, I know it is a algorithms book and code shouldn't matter. I like the idea of psuedo java code. But the fact that the code is much more complicated than it has to be can make it tough for some people to follow it. Also throughout the book there are a lot of "refer to blah", and blah is a couple chapters back. So you spend a minute looking for blah and when you finally find it you forget why you are looking at it.

The book does have a good but quick intro to the math needed throughout the rest of the book, but it might be a little too quick for some. For almost every algorithm there is a thorough explanation, proof, and whatever else is needed.

All in all this isn't a bad book but you could probably find better.

This book really didn't give much at all. Much because of its useless explainations, that are probably really juicy if you already know it and pretty worthless if you don't... I didn't. Just one thing to do, attend all classes if you got this book for class litterature, and if you live in Canada or as I do in Sweden, use it as fire wood-substitute when it's cold...

(Hmm does layout spell "n-o-t-e-p-a-d"?)

I am 3rd year undergraduate student and just finished taking a class that requires this book. This book was so unhelpful in trying to do assignments or even understand the text. As a matter of fact you will be in chapter 8 trying to reference an algorithm in chapter 1. You end up spending to much time trying to find information that is not even in this book.

This book is GARBAGE!!!!! If your professor requires this book. Drop the class immediately!!!! I feel this book is an insult to any professor who teaches Design and Analysis of Algorithms!!!

Someone needs to ask the authors if we all can have our money back!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is one of two books I must say sorry to. I hope readers may find my words helpful. I must say this is a poor book, although I feel the authors did put efforts to make it nice.

There are a lot of classical and excellent books on this subject. But here's the reason my department chose it as our textbook: Because the other books are relatively hard and deep for the students.

But here is the response from the studnets at the end of the semester, no matter it is an A student or C student: They hate this book, since they can not get much information after spending hours and hours on it. And they eventually found those "harder" books in lib, and loved them. The key reason is, those books explained everything clearly. (In almost the same number of pages.)

The key problem as I see is, the authors just understood the materials in a certain way, but not thoroughly, and not able to explain it in a clear way. Only a person who has already know all the stuff can figure out what are the authors talking about in some part of the book.

Now I believe, in order to write a good textbook for students, at least you should be a master in this area.

If some of my words hurts, I am sorry. But I am talking about my feeling and most students' feeling.

This book contains some good information, but it's written in a pretty annoying fashion. As other people have noted, you'll constantly need to flip back (or forward) pages or whole sections just to figure out where a particular variable or function was defined. It makes the book confusing and time consuming to follow. I'd stick with Cormen's book.

This book is not very clear, skips steps, and in general wanders around. This is one of the worst computer science books I have read. Unfortunately I had to buy it for a class; so unless you find yourself in a similar position, don't buy this book.

I don't quite understand all of these negative reviews. This is a solid text for algorithmic analysis that for the most part is at just the right level for most students -- neither too theoretical nor too superficial for the important topics. The graph algorithms material is a nice improvement over the earlier edition. I've used this book as an instructor many times and most serious students have found it to be an effective complement to the material presented in class.