Absolutely. Think they have a kindle edition out too.. its going to be cheaper.
The book hits the sweet spot for most practical folks and also has great theoretical connectors / flow.
After someone spends around six months of working / implementing things out of joy, you will be able to discern what to keep or reject from other sources.
So? I've on occasion changed my Kindle account address to the U.K. (Amazon's office in Slough, more specifically), ordered a U.K.-only book (back when AMZN and the publishers were having their public spat) and changed my address back. I suspect the same might work in reverse.
So does this mean one could earn affiliate revenue from your purchases by registering as an affiliate called monkey_poo, or do they not allow you to choose your ID?
I think the Top Coder tutorials are really thought provoking and they cover a lot of ground. A really good summary of the core concepts which you can further research.
Am I the only one that thinks the tutorials are a bit weird.
For example: their QuickSort implementation looks pretty much "sub-optimal"". ( They allocate new arrays in each recursive call )
Another example: Shortest-Path search. A-Star is not mentioned.
Agreed but you have to keep in mind what the algorithms are being used for.
You're going to have better luck implementing Dijkstra's quickly in a competition than you are A-Star. Not to mention A-Star is based mostly on heuristics and if you don't have time (or don't care) then bad heuristics makes it just as fast as Dikstra's.
Regarding A-star, it doesn't generally come up in this kind of contest. When you are doing a TopCoder/ICPC/Project Euler problem and you need to find shortest paths, you need exact solutions because you want your result to match the judges' result. In a programming contest in which the programs compete against each other, instead of passing or failing, A-star would be much more important.
One note to make is that these tutorials are specifically designed for programming contests not for the real world. A lot of the stuff applies to both, but things like constant factor optimization and heuristics are generally not part of programming classes and a huge part of the real world.
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[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] threadClick through to some of the actual algorithm pages, for instance the Traveling Salesman Problem: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/files/traveling-salesman....
Great book, great site.
The book hits the sweet spot for most practical folks and also has great theoretical connectors / flow.
After someone spends around six months of working / implementing things out of joy, you will be able to discern what to keep or reject from other sources.
another url -> http://www.algorist.com
It's a kludge, but it works.
It is worth mentioning that further within this link he has posted video lectures from 1997 and 2007, along with audio and presentation slides:
(Analysis of Algorithms Course):
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/video-lectures/
(Programming Challenges Course):
http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/programmingchallenges/
Does any one know what the "ref=ase_thealgorithmrepo/" at the end of the url means? If I remove it, it doesn't seem to change anything.
does not change the page itself. If you want to have fun you can change it to "ref=monkey_poo" as I am wont to do.
Seems like it would be nice to help them out.
http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/#books
To be clear, I wasn't trying to imply anything sneaky going on. I was curious as to what these parameters mean :)
I appreciate the response
You're going to have better luck implementing Dijkstra's quickly in a competition than you are A-Star. Not to mention A-Star is based mostly on heuristics and if you don't have time (or don't care) then bad heuristics makes it just as fast as Dikstra's.