Practical Algorithms for Programmers

We have this book in our lab and many times I've been able to refactor my own implementation after reading the code in this book. The chapter that deals with dates is very well presented and doubles as a history lesson since it covers all the adjustments that have been made to our calendar over the centuries. The source is writen in plain C so it should be easy to port to other languages.

This book has the singular benefit of doing complete implementations of algorithms, not just code snippets nor pseudo-code. (The code is in C.)The book also covers lots of the algorithms other books forget: searching for multiple strings at once, searching for regular expressions, complete calendar routines, arbitrary-precision arithmetic, phonetic searches, most data-compression algorithms (including the one used by Microsoft in its product distribution), etc. Plus all the traditional sorts and data structures that appear in other books. As to data structures, it's one of the few books that implements an ISAM routine using your choice of red-black or B-trees. (By the way, although there is a coupon at the back of the book for a source code disk, the code is made available here for free download: http://www.pacificdataworks.com/bookdownload.html The authors update the codebase intermittently.)A good book, which has no direct counterpart.

I bought this book 3 years ago. I learn a lot from it. I still use it. It's worth the money.

The english in this book is very clear (to me), and the explainations are short and to the point. I personally have a very short attention span, so reading many paragraphs of stuffy technical descriptions found in other books is nearly impossible for me to bear. The book goes over linked lists, binary trees, red/black trees, b-trees, hash tables, gregorian & julian date/time conversion, Chksums & CRCs, compression(LZ,huffman,LZW). The book is excellent for anyone having trouble understanding this type of material in a CS course, think of this book as CS Cliff's Notes. The copy I own would be on my desk at all times, except that it gets borrowed so much that I rarely know who in the company has it. My cover is nearly falling off and the corners are all bend up from the large amount of use that this book gets.

If you want to learn how to implement the LZW algorithm in your code, or do other commmon algorithms in C this book is for you. I found it very useful. As for the other 1-star reviews, I think that they did not review the title correctly. This is a book for experianced programmers looking to improve their code. I give this book 5-stars.