<< 1 >>
Rating:  Summary: Very interesting material - lousy quality control Review: As someone who is trying to learn how to program on their own, the hardest thing to find is practical examples of how things might be done. Most authors are either too lazy to provide complete code, seem to have a problem with providing it, or are way out of touch with the needs of their audience. This book provides a wealth of very interesting ideas and applied examples. And the examples are complete, they are not just snippets where you have to guess how to fill in the rest of the blanks.This book has allowed me to step to a new level of understanding; however, the quality of the implementation is appalling. These boys should be smacked for such shoddy editing. As the previous commentor remarked, it is an exercise in debugging. But in a strange way this hasn't been without its benefits. To get the programs to work, I was forced to really understand what the authors were trying to achieve, and as a result gained a better understanding of the programs; it even made think about how I might do things differently. This is not a book for people who don't want to think who want it to work off the shelf. But from a learning point of view it has been extremely worthwhile to me; I have not seen another book out there with such large and engaging examples.
Rating:  Summary: Great! But there is a bug on source code. Watch out ! Review: Great book! Many practical algorithms are there. :) But also there is a practical bug on source code. For example, Ch 4,boyermor.c, listing 4-3 : Line 73: memset( CharJump, 0, Alphabetsize * sizeof(unsigned) ); It should be as follows: memset( CharJump, PatLen, Alphabetsize * sizeof (unsigned) ); This is a minor bug. But it can slow down boyer-moore searching speed. It's hard to be detected by empirical debugging. There is no bug in algorithm explanation. So,do not 100% rely on source code example. Read explanation, then apply example source code to your own source.
Rating:  Summary: Great! But there is a bug on source code. Watch out ! Review: Great book! Many practical algorithms are there. :) But also there is a practical bug on source code. For example, Ch 4,boyermor.c, listing 4-3 : Line 73: memset( CharJump, 0, Alphabetsize * sizeof(unsigned) ); It should be as follows: memset( CharJump, PatLen, Alphabetsize * sizeof (unsigned) ); This is a minor bug. But it can slow down boyer-moore searching speed. It's hard to be detected by empirical debugging. There is no bug in algorithm explanation. So,do not 100% rely on source code example. Read explanation, then apply example source code to your own source.
Rating:  Summary: This book is worth to keep Review: I bought this book 3 years ago. I learn a lot from it. I still use it. It's worth the money.
Rating:  Summary: Great Book Review: 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.
Rating:  Summary: Think of this book as CS Cliff's Notes. Review: 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.
Rating:  Summary: Do not buy this book. Review: The text of the book does an adequate job of describing the basic algorithms. However, the source code examples are sprinkled with C intricacies and complexities that cloud the very subject matter that the book has set out to teach. The book has much to offer but I could not tollerate the horrid (yet thorough) source code examples, and did not get past the first few chapters.
Rating:  Summary: This book is TERRIBLE. Go with the classic Algorithms in C. Review: This book has factual errors, and errors in the derivations of algorithms (though the algorithms themselves are *sometimes* correct.) This is a good book to avoid.
Rating:  Summary: The most complete collection of implemented algorithms. Review: 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.
Rating:  Summary: An excellent resource for all programmers Review: This is an excellent reference for all programmers of C. Not only are the authors well versed in their subject matter they convey their ideas and concepts well also. The date and time functions I found to be worth the price of the book itself. This is a must have for any serious C programmer!
<< 1 >>
|