Customer Reviews

Data Streams: Algorithms and Applications (Foundations and Trends in Theoretical Computer Science,)

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The book lists a fair number of important problems in the rapidly developing area of data stream algorithms (algorithms for processing huge amounts of data in one or more passes without ever loading the entire dataset into memory, for example network traffic or webpage hits). Every problem is explained and then the author discusses the known ideas for solving this problem and gives references to papers where the solutions are presented in full. The book is very accessible, does not have a lot of math and has only the simplest outlines of algorithms and proofs (for others, the reader is sent to the original sources). This is both good and bad: it is more like a survey than like a textbook; I expected to learn more from the book itself. Anyways, as a survey the book is invaluable and I'm grateful to the author for producing it. Also, though I didn't learn many algorithms and proofs, I learn quite a few good ideas; the book is well-structured and ideas are presented explicitly.