Customer Reviews

Practical Algorithms for Programmers

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Great book! Many practical algorithms are there. :) But also there is a practical bug on source code. For example, Ch 4,boyermor.c, listing 4-3 : Line 73:

memset( CharJump, 0, Alphabetsize * sizeof(unsigned) );

It should be as follows:

memset( CharJump, PatLen, Alphabetsize * sizeof (unsigned) );

This is a minor bug. But it can slow down boyer-moore searching speed. It's hard to be detected by empirical debugging. There is no bug in algorithm explanation. So,do not 100% rely on source code example. Read explanation, then apply example source code to your own source.

The english in this book is very clear (to me), and the explainations are short and to the point. I personally have a very short attention span, so reading many paragraphs of stuffy technical descriptions found in other books is nearly impossible for me to bear. The book goes over linked lists, binary trees, red/black trees, b-trees, hash tables, gregorian&julian date/time conversion, Chksums&CRCs, compression(LZ,huffman,LZW). The book is excellent for anyone having trouble understanding this type of material in a CS course, think of this book as CS Cliff's Notes. The copy I own would be on my desk at all times, except that it gets borrowed so much that I rarely know who in the company has it. My cover is nearly falling off and the corners are all bend up from the large amount of use that this book gets.

As someone who is trying to learn how to program on their own, the hardest thing to find is practical examples of how things might be done. Most authors are either too lazy to provide complete code, seem to have a problem with providing it, or are way out of touch with the needs of their audience. This book provides a wealth of very interesting ideas and applied examples. And the examples are complete, they are not just snippets where you have to guess how to fill in the rest of the blanks.

This book has allowed me to step to a new level of understanding; however, the quality of the implementation is appalling. These boys should be smacked for such shoddy editing. As the previous commentor remarked, it is an exercise in debugging. But in a strange way this hasn't been without its benefits. To get the programs to work, I was forced to really understand what the authors were trying to achieve, and as a result gained a better understanding of the programs; it even made think about how I might do things differently.

This is not a book for people who don't want to think who want it to work off the shelf. But from a learning point of view it has been extremely worthwhile to me; I have not seen another book out there with such large and engaging examples.

If you want to learn how to implement the LZW algorithm in your code, or do other commmon algorithms in C this book is for you. I found it very useful. As for the other 1-star reviews, I think that they did not review the title correctly. This is a book for experianced programmers looking to improve their code. I give this book 5-stars.

The idea of presenting a variety of popular algorithms from a non-mathematical perspective, and of including fully coded (in C++) implementations is a great one. Unfortunately, the implementations presented in this book suffer from lack of testing and the book often becomes an exercise in debugging.

We have this book in our lab and many times I've been able to refactor my own implementation after reading the code in this book. The chapter that deals with dates is very well presented and doubles as a history lesson since it covers all the adjustments that have been made to our calendar over the centuries. The source is writen in plain C so it should be easy to port to other languages.

This book has the singular benefit of doing complete implementations of algorithms, not just code snippets nor pseudo-code. (The code is in C.)

The book also covers lots of the algorithms other books forget: searching for multiple strings at once, searching for regular expressions, complete calendar routines, arbitrary-precision arithmetic, phonetic searches, most data-compression algorithms (including the one used by Microsoft in its product distribution), etc. Plus all the traditional sorts and data structures that appear in other books. As to data structures, it's one of the few books that implements an ISAM routine using your choice of red-black or B-trees.

(By the way, although there is a coupon at the back of the book for a source code disk, the code is made available here for free download: http://www.pacificdataworks.com/bookdownload.html The authors update the codebase intermittently.)

A good book, which has no direct counterpart.

There are numerous well written books on algorithms. Those by Sedgewick and Knuth come to mind, for example. But some students find these too hard. Binstock and Rex aimed their work at this need. This book has very little in the way of fancy maths. It emphasises examples with complete code listings. Not unlike "Numerical Recipes". Hence, you can also treat the text as a cookbook for your needs.

The code is in C. If you are using another language, you can get some practise in seeing how well and accurately you understand the book's code.

I bought this book 3 years ago. I learn a lot from it. I still use it. It's worth the money.

This is an excellent reference for all programmers of C. Not only are the authors well versed in their subject matter they convey their ideas and concepts well also. The date and time functions I found to be worth the price of the book itself. This is a must have for any serious C programmer!