Algorithms in a Nutshell

by George T. Heineman and Gary Pollice and Stanley Selkow

O'Reilly Media (368 pages)
Keyword(s): Programming
Dates read: March 15-29, 2010, Rating: ***

This is a decent reference to a pretty good array of algorithms. It touches on sorting, search, graphs, and computational geometry. The one-page summaries of the algorithms are mostly very good, though some are more self-sufficient than others. The text is adequate if you've been exposed to an algorithm before, but I found it lacking in the areas where my background was weakest (the explanation of Ford-Fulkerson is particularly bad). On several occasions (including Ford-Fulkerson), I got a much better understanding by calling up the Wikipedia page on a particular algorithm.

Although there are shortcomings, I made some notes about a few of the algorithms and improved my understanding of the tradeoffs between a few different algorithms, and I can easily imaging using this as a quick reference sometime in the future.

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