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Summary: Puzzles for You and Your PC
Review: I can't speak for professional programmers, but Puzzled Programmers is a great book for us duffers in the programming world. It contains 15 puzzles of increasing difficulty, held together by a surprisingly interesting narrative about programmers and a tech writer at a Silicon Valley company in the 80's. The puzzles, which would be difficult, if not impossible, to solve by hand, are intended to be solved by computer. The puzzle for the reader is to write a program that solves the puzzle.The book is a bit dated, having been written in 1987. The answers are given in Pascal, BASIC, and C. The benchmarks for run times are for an 8 Mhz CPU. But that doesn't matter. The challenge is in analysing the puzzle and developing an algorithm to solve it. How that algorithm gets fed to the computer is of secondary importance. All but one of the puzzles deal with recreational number theory. For example, find the smallest integer that is the sum of two cubes in two different ways. The odd one out involves the computation of a probability. The solutions get progressively longer, but number 15 is only about a hundred lines of code in BASIC. Most are much shorter. If you like puzzles and learned to program, but never get to do it, this books for you.
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