Algorithms in C, Parts 1-4: Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching

by Robert Sedgewick

Book Overview

This is an eminently readable book which an ordinary programmer, unskilled in mathematical analysis and wary of theoretical algorithms, ought to be able to pick up and get a lot out of..
- Steve Summit, author of C Programming FAQs Sedgewick has a real gift for explaining concepts in a way that makes them easy to understand. The use of real programs in page-size (or less) chunks that can be easily understood is a real plus...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0201314525
• ISBN13: 9780201314526
• Release Date: September 1997
• Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
• Length: 720 Pages
• Weight: 2.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.8" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A Classic on Algorithms...

...that is as relevant today as when it was first written. As a computer scientist for 20 years, few books have had as long lasting an impact as this book. What has always amazed me is that once you've worked your way through an algorithm, and Sedgewick's explanation, you remember it. For me, it was, and still is, a foundation of computer science and as ready a reference today. Really liked the writing style, Sedgewick does a good job of keeping the explanation human-friendly. Face it, it's a book on algorithms, not quite a summer reading beach book. :-) All told, I put this book up with the Knuth series...btw, Sedgewick was a student of Knuth's. Enjoy, and hope it helps out as it did me.

Great book a must have

This is one of the best book that I have ever read. The writer explained data stucture in a very good detail. However, this is NOT a book for those beginers, writer assumed that readers must have some strong background in both C programming and math. As many C code functions are left out. There is a clear difference between IT and computer science, if you just make web pages, click mouse in windows, know a little bit about programming, you will find this is a book hard to read and follow. On the other hand if you are computer scientist, digging underground understanding of lists, tree, pattern matching. This book is, undoubtedly the one to go.

A good overview of algorithms...

I haven't been into algorithms and such things for very long, and yet I find that, with a bit of patience and good will, it's not that hard to understand, contrary to some other review. Of course, it's a long book, but then, if you can't be perseverant enough to read such a book, the best solution is just to stay home and do something else! If you want the information given in the book, you're jolly well goning to have to read it! I found this book a very good introduction to algorithms. Of course, as it's a very vast subject, some things were not covered quite as much as some may desire, but this book studies sorting and searching very extensivly, as well as string matching, geometric and mathematical algorithms. It also talks about other subjects such as crytography, data compression, etc, but these are less explained. At any rate, for such subjects as are not fully detailed(in fact, for all subjects), there are references to other books upon the subject.I think this is a very good book to begin with, because it reaches a compromise between completeness and rigourous mathematical dealing of subjects on the one hand, and readability on the other. It gives explainations about the fundamentals of algorithmics, gives and extensively explains the basic, widely used algorithms, while giving the beginner a view of a wide variety of other subjects, which he can then further investigate if he so desires. After a book such as this, one could very well go onto very advanced algorithmic topics in some very specific field.And yet, again, it leads you through it step by step so that it fully available to the motivated reader.

Exceptional love for fine detail of highest quality

There are many books about algorithms, just a few can impress and influence people acting on the very threshold between theoretical research and development of complex software. Robert Sedgewick codes very carefully. Some readers might even fail to recognize the fine details in his code. Try to analyse even the simplest 2-3 liners. Compare the program 4.5 (Linked list implementation of a pushdown stack) or 4.10 (FIFO queue linked list implementation) to similar examples given by lesser authors, figure out the the percentage of redundant code given by others compared to this examples (it is 50% to 300% faster for this elementary cases!).Another example: Look at the insertion sort with a sentinel. I am not aware of any other book showing this simple improvement. Also none of the insertion sorts which I saw in the practice use this so tiny add-on sentinel to achieve the quite dramatic speedup of the process.Naturally, in the time of 700MHz processors here and there a couple of extra instructions might appear unimportant, but I disagree. This is a book showing the basic algorithmics and programming practices in their best, down to the "two liners", regardless what the complexity of the task is. These little "pearls" of coding are in the real world running countless times behind the scenes and are important. Look carefully, learn, master to code as he does!As a very modern text, this is one of the few books dealing at least with some of the newer algorithms, like the skip lists or sorting networks. Not enough, though. Maybe we will see more in the next volume. There are also some omitions of the basic algorithms, which I would expect to be in such a book. See the rather terse chapter 7.8 about selection methods and look into Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest to see what I mean.Despite such complaints, in my eyes this book occupies the worlds top-level rank among texts about algorithms for people who really make software and not just call library functions. I cannot wait to get my hands on the next volume being in preparation.My (standard) point of criticism is that too many exercises are without answers and actually some of them are so complex that a nice chapter with yet some more algorithms would be in place. But almost every book about algorithms has this fault. On the end of a chapter you often see: Improve this, solve that. Its not good enough for a practitioner but it serves purpose for students.Extraordinary are the illustrations of algorithm visualizations which I like so much in this book. My tribut to the author to NOT to use the questionable quotes of famous people on the begin of each chapter, as it lately became an annoying habit. One of the worse examples of such a quote were the alleged words of Albert Einstein "make it as simple as possible but not simpler" placed in an book about C++ (what is a contradiction in itself and quite a presumption on authors part putting himself on a pedestal with... Einstein.

A Great Book on Algorithms

Robert does a good job of explaining the algorithms in this book, and there are quite a few algorithms. The sample code is short so you don't have to read through lots of user interface and driver code to get to the actual algorithm, and it is written so that it isn't hard to copy the code into your own programs and get it to work. The chapter on Introduction to the Analasys of Algorithms has lots of math in it, but the rest of the book contains much more code than math. This book is easy to follow, but it also contains a detailed description of the algorithms it presents. I can't wait until Part 2 of this book is published.