Algorithms in C, Parts 1-4: Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching

This book has helped me incredibly. The ideas that this book brings forward have been the basis of many programming applications that I subsequently created.

Really good book and detailed explanation on Algorithms. I have to stress that this is an Algorithm book but not a Programming Book

I bought this book was because I wanted to make use of C programming language to build something and also because I am interested in implementing the algorithm. However, After spending a few days reading through the first few chapters, I found that this book was really hard to follow. It was not about the difficulty of the content, but because the way how the author tried to explained the content. It must not be easy to write a book talking about the algorithms, so I never found it was easy to study algorithms across to a text book. I think that it also depends on the person. For me, I prefer to pick up the algorithms through as many as problems and practices, not explanations and analysis. However, I believe that this book is thoughtful enough for those who want be professional in teaching algorithms or talking about algorithms in depth.

There are many books about algorithms, just a few can impress and influence people acting on the very threshold between theoretical research and development of complex software. Robert Sedgewick codes very carefully. Some readers might even fail to recognize the fine details in his code. Try to analyse even the simplest 2-3 liners. Compare the program 4.5 (Linked list implementation of a pushdown stack) or 4.10 (FIFO queue linked list implementation) to similar examples given by lesser authors, figure out the the percentage of redundant code given by others compared to this examples (it is 50% to 300% faster for this elementary cases!). Another example: Look at the insertion sort with a sentinel. I am not aware of any other book showing this simple improvement. Also none of the insertion sorts which I saw in the practice use this so tiny add-on sentinel to achieve the quite dramatic speedup of the process. Naturally, in the time of 700MHz processors here and there a couple of extra instructions might appear unimportant, but I disagree. This is a book showing the basic algorithmics and programming practices in their best, down to the "two liners", regardless what the complexity of the task is. These little "pearls" of coding are in the real world running countless times behind the scenes and are important. Look carefully, learn, master to code as he does! As a very modern text, this is one of the few books dealing at least with some of the newer algorithms, like the skip lists or sorting networks. Not enough, though. Maybe we will see more in the next volume. There are also some omitions of the basic algorithms, which I would expect to be in such a book. See the rather terse chapter 7.8 about selection methods and look into Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest to see what I mean. Despite such complaints, in my eyes this book occupies the worlds top-level rank among texts about algorithms for people who really make software and not just call library functions. I cannot wait to get my hands on the next volume being in preparation. My (standard) point of criticism is that too many exercises are without answers and actually some of them are so complex that a nice chapter with yet some more algorithms would be in place. But almost every book about algorithms has this fault. On the end of a chapter you often see: Improve this, solve that. Its not good enough for a practitioner but it serves purpose for students. Extraordinary are the illustrations of algorithm visualizations which I like so much in this book. My tribut to the author to NOT to use the questionable quotes of famous people on the begin of each chapter, as it lately became an annoying habit. One of the worse examples of such a quote were the alleged words of Albert Einstein "make it as simple as possible but not simpler" placed in an book about C++ (what is a contradiction in itself and quite a presumption on authors part putting himself on a pedestal with... Einstein.) But exactly such a quote might almost be applied to this text. Congratulations Mr. Sedgewick!

...that is as relevant today as when it was first written. As a computer scientist for 20 years, few books have had as long lasting an impact as this book. What has always amazed me is that once you've worked your way through an algorithm, and Sedgewick's explanation, you remember it. For me, it was, and still is, a foundation of computer science and as ready a reference today. Really liked the writing style, Sedgewick does a good job of keeping the explanation human-friendly. Face it, it's a book on algorithms, not quite a summer reading beach book. :-) All told, I put this book up with the Knuth series...btw, Sedgewick was a student of Knuth's. Enjoy, and hope it helps out as it did me.

This is one of the best book that I have ever read. The writer explained data stucture in a very good detail. However, this is NOT a book for those beginers, writer assumed that readers must have some strong background in both C programming and math. As many C code functions are left out. There is a clear difference between IT and computer science, if you just make web pages, click mouse in windows, know a little bit about programming, you will find this is a book hard to read and follow. On the other hand if you are computer scientist, digging underground understanding of lists, tree, pattern matching. This book is, undoubtedly the one to go.

I haven't been into algorithms and such things for very long, and yet I find that, with a bit of patience and good will, it's not that hard to understand, contrary to some other review. Of course, it's a long book, but then, if you can't be perseverant enough to read such a book, the best solution is just to stay home and do something else! If you want the information given in the book, you're jolly well goning to have to read it! I found this book a very good introduction to algorithms. Of course, as it's a very vast subject, some things were not covered quite as much as some may desire, but this book studies sorting and searching very extensivly, as well as string matching, geometric and mathematical algorithms. It also talks about other subjects such as crytography, data compression, etc, but these are less explained. At any rate, for such subjects as are not fully detailed(in fact, for all subjects), there are references to other books upon the subject. I think this is a very good book to begin with, because it reaches a compromise between completeness and rigourous mathematical dealing of subjects on the one hand, and readability on the other. It gives explainations about the fundamentals of algorithmics, gives and extensively explains the basic, widely used algorithms, while giving the beginner a view of a wide variety of other subjects, which he can then further investigate if he so desires. After a book such as this, one could very well go onto very advanced algorithmic topics in some very specific field. And yet, again, it leads you through it step by step so that it fully available to the motivated reader.

book for college class.

I am happy that the book is usable.

sedgewick disappoints in this book. not recommended.

Worst print.. Most of the textual content is inside book bind. Print is sometimes faded.. it is a true low price( and low quality) edition.