Practical Algorithms for programmers

ISBN:020163208X
Pages:592
Date:1995-06-19
Publisher:Addison-Wesley Professional
Rating:4.0

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Reviews From AMAZON.COM
A toolbox of elegant implementations
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.
Repetitive and disappointing - Failed to deliver
"Practical Algorithms for Programmers" fails to deliver what is mentioned by authors as "The purpose of this book is providing a practical compendium of algorithms for use in applications" and "Most algorithm books today are either academic text books or rehash of the same tired set of algorithms". This book goes over that tired set of algorithms over again (B-Trees, bubble sort, shell sort etc) and is filled with long code listings with little comments and faux paus code practices (if column > 61). Almost all of the algorithms discussed in the book have already been very well described in various books of the same genre, notably "Introduction to Algorithms, Second Edition by Thomas H. Cormen, Charles E. Leiserson, Ronald L. Rivest, Clifford Stein" which has better explanation and examples. I see that "Practical Algorithms for Programmers" has good description of algorithmic efficiency, B-trees, AVL trees, phonetic comparisons, soundEx and metaphone along with excercises, but as an overall study for a CS grad and/or skilled developer, it's repetitive and meaningless. If authors' idea was to provide a cookbook for algorithm implementation, due to lack of component oriented thinking, this book lack this prospect as well. As mentioned, it's not a text book and therefore I don't see a reason of having about hundred pages of printed source code in the book? If the intended audience are software developers, why not highlight the important code segments and let the rest available via CD/FTP and use remaining pages for practical industry implementation discussions like the title suggests.As mentioned by other reviewers, this book might be a short & quick review or refresher course but I believe that it doesn't add any valuable reference to existing set of books available in this niche. Especially in the current development era when underlying software architectures and programming languages provides the built-in complex datatypes and memory management, algorithm world now belongs to exploration of binomial option pricing, naïve Bayes filtering and normal distribution approximation style studies.