Rating: Summary: Best of the bunch Review: I had to teach this course and must see it is the pick of the books I have seen on this subject though it is far from ideal. Why can't these people use meaningful variable names and comment the code. Is it the authors intent to teach bad programming practice.
Rating: Summary: Decent but I know a much better book. Review: I have read this book and found that most of the code examples are useless. Don't think I am one of those people who want code and not theory, I just think it helps to have a decent example to the theory to work from. This book is not too clear and definitely not worth the money. I do happen to know a much better book written by Jeff Ullman called Foundations of Computer Science. The book is much clearer, simpler, and better organized. I suggest if you are looking for a similar book you get that one instead(NOTE: the book was written by my dad. . . but it would be better anyway.)
Rating: Summary: Decent but I know a much better book. Review: I have read this book and found that most of the code examples are useless. Don't think I am one of those people who want code and not theory, I just think it helps to have a decent example to the theory to work from. This book is not too clear and definitely not worth the money. I do happen to know a much better book written by Jeff Ullman called Foundations of Computer Science. The book is much clearer, simpler, and better organized. I suggest if you are looking for a similar book you get that one instead(NOTE: the book was written by my dad. . . but it would be better anyway.)
Rating: Summary: Not a word on C++, It shouldn't be named this way Review: I wasn't looking for a book on algorithms in C (I already have several of them), I was looking for C++ phylosophy and advantages applied to algorithms. It was very disapointing.
Rating: Summary: Good content but hard to read Review: I'm a learned industrial engineer in electronics but got into informatics right after my degree. So I never had a course on algorithmic and had to learn nearly everything by myself.After some years of working in the field, I tought it was maybe time to get some background on the subject so I got this (now an outdated edition) of the book. Well, it was the book it took the longest to me to finish in the informatics field. The book explains a whole bunch of basic and more advanced general-purpose algorithms, and so has a good coverrage of the subject. However, there are two problems with the book: 1) The coding style is very bad: the author likes to use global variables, and variable names are often very cryptic. Example: * p = parent * g = grandparent * gg = greatgrandparent * c = child * x = current node * y = temporary node ... 2) You cannot read this book's chapters in a random way: you have to follow the chapter ordering, because often knowledge of later chapters is based of knowledge of earlier chapters, and, because of the bad coding style you have to often remember the meaning of the cryptic variable names several chapters later when they are reused. If you're like me, you've forgotten the meaning, which means reread that damn chapter, which in turn can again be based on an earlier chapter. You get the picture why it took me so long?
Rating: Summary: Why do people like this book? Review: It is strange to me why some people love this book so much. Admittedly, Sedgewick is very respected in his field and knows a lot about sorting algorithms, but his book is still dissapointing and very frustrating to read for a beginning computer science student. He seldom includes complete code in his examples, and where there is code, there are sometimes errors in the code. This reviewer took Sedgewick's class at Princeton University where this book was the required text, and not only was the text poor, his lectures were terribly boring. He himself even recognized that there were errors in his book, and so he allowed his students and TA's to submit errors found in the book. At the end of the year, the list of references to mistakes in the book took up more than three pages. This review is not the result of a student upset about his grade (an A is fine with me), but is rather an attempt to warn students about the potential pitfalls that may be encountered in reading Sedgewick's book. I suppose this could be a great book for an intermediate or advanced CS student who doesn't mind the sparse and sometimes erroneous code or the terse language used to describe fairly complex ideas. Also, there are some parts of the book that are well written and a pleasure to read. However, I would never recomend this book to anyone interested in learning algorithms for this first time without a fair amount of prior programming experience.
Rating: Summary: Attention : These are NOT reviews for part 5 Review: Just wanted to let everyone know that the reviews here (till 6th March 2002 at any rate) are not of the book 'Algorithms in C++ part 5 graph algorithms' by Robert Sedgewick, but of the earlier edition of his book on algorithms. To get an idea of the book it's supposed to be about, please refer to the review(s) on 'Algorithms in C part 5 graph algorithms', which i expect to identical but for the code. It'd be surprising indeed if the book isn't substantially better than the reviews for the earlier book indicate .......... The first volume, ie parts 1-4 are excellent - please refer to the reviews on that, they're for the current edition :-)
Rating: Summary: Attention : These are NOT reviews for part 5 Review: Just wanted to let everyone know that the reviews here (till 6th March 2002 at any rate) are not of the book 'Algorithms in C++ part 5 graph algorithms' by Robert Sedgewick, but of the earlier edition of his book on algorithms. To get an idea of the book it's supposed to be about, please refer to the review(s) on 'Algorithms in C part 5 graph algorithms', which i expect to identical but for the code. It'd be surprising indeed if the book isn't substantially better than the reviews for the earlier book indicate .......... The first volume, ie parts 1-4 are excellent - please refer to the reviews on that, they're for the current edition :-)
Rating: Summary: Very intuitive, but code examples could be clearer Review: The algorithm descriptions are, for the most part, reasonably easy to follow. The diagrams help to give you a very intuitive "feel" of how each algorithm works, and how each compares to other similar algorithms. This is, without doubt, my favorite aspect of this book. Another thing I like is that it didn't read like your standard textbook; it was much less formal, which I found a refreshing change (I read it in college). On the minus side, the code was pretty much C plus classes. Switching from C to C++ really didn't add any value. The author chose to write the code to be as small and concise as reasonable in order to convey the structure of the algorithm in question. I think that he went too far towards this goal; the variable names are are far too short, leading to confusion in complicated algorithms, and very few in-line comments are used. Bottom line: while it certainly is not a model of how to write well-designed C++, it accomplishes its goal very well: describing, comparing, and contrasting basic to intermediate frequently used algorithms in a very intuitive way.
Rating: Summary: Very intuitive, but code examples could be clearer Review: The algorithm descriptions are, for the most part, reasonably easy to follow. The diagrams help to give you a very intuitive "feel" of how each algorithm works, and how each compares to other similar algorithms. This is, without doubt, my favorite aspect of this book. Another thing I like is that it didn't read like your standard textbook; it was much less formal, which I found a refreshing change (I read it in college). On the minus side, the code was pretty much C plus classes. Switching from C to C++ really didn't add any value. The author chose to write the code to be as small and concise as reasonable in order to convey the structure of the algorithm in question. I think that he went too far towards this goal; the variable names are are far too short, leading to confusion in complicated algorithms, and very few in-line comments are used. Bottom line: while it certainly is not a model of how to write well-designed C++, it accomplishes its goal very well: describing, comparing, and contrasting basic to intermediate frequently used algorithms in a very intuitive way.
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