The Algorithm Design Manual

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It has all the right ingredients: rich contents, friendly, personal language, subtle humor, the right references, and a plethora of pointers to resources. For a decade, Steven Skiena's Algorithm Design Manual retained its title as the best and most comprehensive practical algorithm guide to help identify and solve problems. The second is a reference section, which includes a catalog of the 75 most important algorithmic problems. I especially liked The Algorithm Design Manual because of the author's writing style, the "war stories" (that are some clever and practical applications of the data structures and algorithms the author tries to teach you) and the second half part of the book which is a sort of encyclopedia of problems. The book’s unique structure makes it more likely to be immediately useful to the practitioner who has problem to solve and wants to quickly make progress … .

There were some instances (graph algorithms) where the code in Skiena was taken straight out of CLRS.and so one should probably have a more rigorous book at hand to fill in some details when necessary. It is really intended as a set of pointers to get you started on where to look up details for approaches to a particular problem, and in that respect succeeds quite well (and has a lot of up-to-date references). this book is suitable as a text for an undergraduate algorithms class, but also as an invaluable reference for the practicing programmer. The text is very accessible to read and the pictures help to visualise and understand what's going on.

The second part, Resources , is intended for browsing and reference, and comprises the catalog of algorithmic resources, implementations and an extensive bibliography. With its aid, most programmers could go from writing code that merely works to writing code that is thousands of times more efficient and reliable: this book will earn some people fortunes. He is recipient of the ONR Young Investigator Award and the IEEE Computer Science and Engineering Undergraduate Teaching Award. This book is a practical, example-driven book on computer science algorithms, which is very readable and has a wealth of ready-to-use examples.

The reader-friendly Algorithm Design Manual provides straightforward access to combinatorial algorithms technology, stressing design over analysis.