| Title | : | Algorithms Unlocked |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1299284272 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781299284272 |
| Format Type | : | ebook |
| Number of Pages | : | 237 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2013 |
Algorithms Unlocked Reviews
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This book is a gem. Extremely well written, not dry, yet precise. It covers many important algorithms and intuitions behind their design and timings. At a little over 200 pages, 10 chapters, the book can realistically be read in about 10 days in its entirety.
I am reading the book as part of preparation for a technical interview. It is wonderful in this context. I've been familiar with 99% of the algorithmic concepts this book discusses for years, and yet details not used daily are eventually forgotten. Many of us are (vaguely?) familiar with all the classic sorting algorithms, but can we code them correctly on a whiteboard in reasonable time w/o off-by-one errors and such?
I think the author has perfectly hit a sweet spot of importance, completeness and precision in a package that is very readable.
I truly recommend this book to people who need to prepare for a software engineer interview. -
This book is great as a first introduction to the formal study of algorithms. It assumes no prior knowledge of algorithms analysis and a pretty basic knowledge of mathematics. The author succeeds in explaining some complicated concepts simply for the (more or less) lay reader. As for me, I studied this to whet my appetite before plunging headfirst into the massive tome that is CLRS.
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This book serves as a soft introduction to algorithms and how they work to solve real world problems,without any of the mathematical rigor. In that sense this book is quite useful to someone who is new to programming or simply wants to understand how computer programs or algorithms work. This is not a textbook (the other book ie. introduction to algorithms, coauthored by Cormen is more appropriate) that describes algorithm design techniques and certainly does not contain practice exercises at the end of the book (although there are handy citations). Rather than mathematical proofs, the author employs simple analogies and reasoning to explain the works of the algorithms. I think the chapters on shortest path algorithms, sorting and string algorithms are quite adequate as a way of introduction.
As the author exclaims in the preface, if you get this algorithm joke you are pretty much half way there to understanding algorithm outlines:
Did you hear about the computer scientist who got stuck in the shower? He was washing his hair and following the instructions on the shampoo bottle. They read "Lather. Rinse. Repeat." -
I just love reading Thomas Cormen.
If you've never read a book on algorithms and don't have enough time to go into 1000+ pages of CLRS ("Introduction to Algorithms"), this book is for you. In 10 short chapters (total of 240 pages), it goes through no more than 20 algorithms in just enough detail so you get the gist. It's not just merge-sort and bubble-sort either – it goes into string matching, compression, paths in graphs and even NP-completeness.
It will give you a taste of a beautiful subject and leave you wanting more. -
This is the kind of book one wants to keep coming back to. It is a crisp account of the different algorithms that run the world. A very easy read. The visceral treatment makes this book an introductory text. I highly recommend this to anyone interested in knowing about algorithms.
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This is one of the best books I have read on algorithms, entry level and highly digestible and the book itself is structured effectively chapter by chapter. I loved the fact that the author used pseudocode to describe the algorithm logics which made the the explanations much more focused on the logic.
As mentioned, it’s entry level, touches the basics such as binary search, sorting algorithms, etc. but it gets into medium to advanced category a bit in the last a few chapters where it touches NP-hard problems and graph algorithms. -
Definitely not as good and thorough as "Introduction to Algorithms", but good enough for anyone looking a simpler introduction.
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Its like mini version of CLRS.
Good to have after you have studied something more thorough. -
Decided to start reviewing books that I read to create a habit of summarising my thoughts about the book, reflect a bit, and practice posting in Engish.
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I am a software engineer and I am lacking (after this book it should be better) a good understanding of algorithms.
My first thoughts are that this book is one of those that you can label as a fundamental book.
It's got described almost every most popular software algorithm used today step by step.
It's got an explanation of Big O notation and how it's calculated.
And obviously, it's got a ton of references to lectures and the big book
Introduction to Algorithms for further study.
Although I understood something around 40-50% of the material due to a lack of math theory, it is a good start, and it was quite fruitful to spend time reading this book. -
This book gives a great overview of a broad variety of topics in algorithms, and supplies a decent amount of technical detail in the form of pseudocode and some fairly meaty proof outlines (enough to prepare for a more comprehensive text, such as CLRS). Somehow, I found the section on PERT charts almost as difficult as puzzling through the reduction of 3-CNF to the subset sum problem... I think the examples presented in those sections served to muddy the technique required, unlike the clarity provided by other examples in the book (running through the examples for algorithms on strings in chapter 7 was challenging yet rewarding!) I'm definitely going to return to this book to keep my knowledge of basic techniques sharp!
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More of a 3.75. Some parts were incredibly tough to read for someone from a non computer science background. Took two attempts to finish reading. However, it definitely whet the appetite for a deeper dive on algorithms.
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Not for the newbies.
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NOTE:
I've used this book as a refresher for basic algorithms. I did not need explanations for how XYZ works - I've rather used it as a bullet points on what to refresh from different sources including my own notes, code snippets etc.
BUT!
I have no idea what audience this books targets?
Author claims that he tried to avoid code snippets to make it more approachable to non-technical folks but that is so untrue!
If you want to make it approachable to non-tech (and also tech!) people, you'd have a lot of diagrams, step by step visualizations of algorithms, data structures and so on. There are of course some attempts to do so but the way things like Quicksort are presented made me cry.
If you write a book, that tries to be concise and focused, yet you force even technical audience to reach out for other algo books like (my favourite) Sedgewick's Algorithms, you know you've failed.
Idea of building some sort of instinctive understanding of how things work (like divide and conquer algos) is a clever (and probably right one) but delivery was - in my humble opinion - poor.
Don't bother buying this book. Buy CLRS or my favourite "Algorithms" by Sedgewick.
Although it was cheap to buy polish version of it, I do regret buying it anyway. -
A good introductory book, especially for those who are new to programming. However, those who already had some previous exposures to algorithms might prefer the more precise and concise pseudocodes than the "wetwares" used by the author.
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I like chapter 8 most. Then 3 and 4.
Probably because I was exposed to these areas more often than the other.
Comparing this book with the Introduction to Emacs lisp programming, I spent less time trying to figure out the problem by myself. -
O pouco que li já nas primeiras páginas me ajudou muito com as matérias que estou estudando na faculdade. É um excelente livro!
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Good algorithms book.
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A nice organized book and friendly to people who have little computer science background.
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A whole lotta good stuff.
The second half was particularly useful for me.
- dags
- shortest paths
- cryptography
- data compression
- NP-completeness (mother problem, reduction between problems) -
Provides simple and clear explanation. For me, I realize that nothing can beat the practice in learning algorithms. With that in mind, this book was still enjoyable. It will gently guide us to CLRS.
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Written by Thomas Cormen because the
Introduction to Algorithms has been deemed too technical by the MIT Press!
Professor Cormen intended to make this book an in-between book between the very theoretical books and the very techincal books. He didn't assume much scientific or mathematical background knowledge for the readers. In other words it's not actually intended for people on the field.
How easy is it for people from outside the field? I can't say! It wouldn't be impossible to understand. I'd recommend this book to anyone how wants to understand how computers solve problems.
And I would definitely recommend this book to some people from the field. Even though I've been engaged in competitive programming ever since I started college, it was useful for me in some topics in which my knowledge is admittedly shallow, as in cryptography and NP vs P problem. -
Wreszcie znalazłem czas żeby skończyć. Lekko napisana książeczka o algorytmach. Dywagacje ZPL o tłumaczeniu różnych pojęć do zaakceptowania i nie doskwierają mocno.
Niestety jakość edytorska Helionu nadal pozostaje na niskim poziomie. Ginące wypunktowania, opisy rysunków czy tabel z tej samej strony, jakby były na stronie następnej zdarzają się często. Obyło się bez błędów w pseudokodzie, ale literówki w oznaczeniach zbiorów(lub grafów), albo błędne słowa(krawędź zamiast wierzchołka) też się pojawiły i zmuszają czasami do bardziej wytężonego czytania, aby nie zgubić się w jakimś mniej formalnym dowodzie. -
Книга требует привычки к сухому математическому языку.
Она с одной стороны не подойдет человеку изучавшему математику на уровне школьной программы, но человеку сильному в математике эта книжка может показаться поверхностной, обрывочной, скачащей с темы на тему. -
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