Algorithm Design: Foundations, Analysis, and Internet Examples

This book will take you from "programmer" to "engineer". Recommended to me by a Google engineer. You use her work everyday. You need understanding of programming fundamentals to use this book. With that said, if you finish this book and the exercises, you'll be in the top ranks. Easy to read and not quite as dense as CLRS Introduction to Algorithms.

After researching a variety of alternatives, I settled upon using Algorithm Design by Goodrich and Tamassia to teach a junior-level algorithms course and the experience has been quite positive. While instructor material grows a bit sparse in the last half or third of the book, it's still quite useful. The slides are great and many of the problems have solutions available. Moreover, the solutions tend to be correct (I've only found two mistakes, which may be covered in the up-to-date errata). The layout of the sections and chapters is quite natural and easy to adapt to your own course, although the last third of the book is essentially an assortment of topics that didn't fit in anywhere else. I would advise bringing some of those topics in to the course early on as diversions from the main material, which admittedly can get a little dry. For the most part, the book is well written with interesting and adequete end of chapter problems. There are relatively few Java-based examples, but we skipped over them anyhow -- the pseudo-code is quite acceptable. Goodrich and Tamassia give a broad survey of topics, but cover them in enough depth and with enough rigor for an undergraduate course where CLR(S) would be overkill. I recommend it.

I would not consider this book as the ultimate book for algorithms as the title suggests. :-) However, it is a very readable book, and filled with brief, but concise observations. Do not get me wrong. This book also has very detailed explanations of fundamental data structures and algorithms. Also, the best part of the book is that it lists good references for further readings. I loved this book. I would suggest this book to others. Math hints at the back of the books are useful, and some excercises are quite brain challenging. I think it is a great practice for students, but it is not so fun when students get it for assignments. :-)

There are many good books with this title or similar ones. This is probably one of the better ones for your bookshelf and for use in academia. The examples are written in Java (a current language) and they are easy to read. The presentation is clean and illustrative. The authors have a good track record for expertise and papers published, and you get the sense that it is more real-world than most similar books.