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From: AlgoMan on 5 Feb 2005 02:20
Hi,

I have been trying my hand at programming for a year as an amateur.

However, I have no formal education in computer science or mathematics.
Hence, now I am learning algorithms & data structures from some
textbooks.

People recommend "Introduction to Algorithms" by Thomas Cormen etc
& Sedgewicks algorithm books. Unfortunately, IMHO, these books are not
easy to
understand for someone who doesn't have a formal Math/CompScience
backgroup.
I think you need to know a lot of mathematics, mathematical notations
etc for
understanding Cormen. As far as Sedgewick is concerned, his coding is
rather
complicated to understand for a beginner, he applies a twist to even
simple
algorithms which make them slightly difficult to understand.

For eg. most other books, explain the Towers of Hanoi solution with
this function prototype.

hanoi(N, Source, Dest, Aux)

Sedgewick has
hanoi(int N, int d)

Had to read it many times to understand what he is doing here, whereas
the
Source, Dest thingy is very intuitive to understand for a beginner.
Sedgwick tries to make all his programs very small, elegant & compact,
which
make them a little difficult to understand for a beginner. Other than
that,
Sedgewick goes deep into different analysis, which are very difficult
to
understand.

I came across the book "Programming Pearls" by Jon Bentley. This
books explains algorithms in a very very beautiful & elegant manner for
a beginner.
Things which I have found very very complex in other books, I
understood in
1st reading with Bentley. Unfortunately, his books do not cover
algorithms
& data structures exhaustively, but are just a collection of papers,
some of
which concentrate on algorithms.

Are there are any books on Data Structures & Algorithms which cover
this
subject in the same manner that Bentley does in his papers?

From: Stephen Brooker on 5 Feb 2005 02:55
AlgoMan wrote:
>
> Are there are any books on Data Structures & Algorithms which cover
> this
> subject in the same manner that Bentley does in his papers?
>

Have a look here: http://www.techbooksforfree.com/
There are one or two books listed from memory.

For printed material I have a copy of "Algorithms and Data Structures:
An Approach in C" by Bowman, it's quite good and easy to understand.
From: Christopher on 5 Feb 2005 11:21
> Are there are any books on Data Structures & Algorithms which cover
> this subject in the same manner that Bentley does in his papers?

Presumably you did an Amazon seach on your author and came up with nothing.

You can try "Numerical Recipes" and related books such as those, which might help.

However, if you really want a mastery of the concepts, Sedgewick is pretty hard to beat, and well-worth the time to
re-read certain things or step through the code on an IDE to understand. I also own the Corman book you mentioned, but
sure, I have a CompSci degree.

I'm going to pass along some hard fact to you, that I received from Bjarne Stroustrup when I worked at AT&T. I asked
him about getting into research without an MS in CompSci, because the math seemed too daunting. He essentially told me
that there's no way around the math, so if it's research I want it, I need to do the math.

A testament either to my character or my desire, I never got the Master's or into research.

Depending on how much you want to learn about algorithms and data structures, there might be no way around the math.
I'll tell you this, Numerical Analysis and Discrete Structures were my favorite math classes, perfect blends of math and
compsci. Sometimes the hard parts are worth the effort.

-C


From: AlgoMan on 5 Feb 2005 12:58
> Have a look here: http://www.techbooksforfree.com/

Thanx a lot for the link. It was very useful.

From: AlgoMan on 5 Feb 2005 13:00
Christopher wrote:
> Sometimes the hard parts are worth the effort.

I agree. I am going to the math at some time, but my idea was that
first I go through
algorithms & DS some, try out programming them, then go back to the
math & then
go to algo & DS again.

As for now, I just want to learn Algo & DS.

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