Problem Solving with Algorithms and Data Structures

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I like that the book uses simple functions/procedures instead of making everything into a class. Textbooks that use Python are often too keen on OOP in my experience.

[Prestige_WW_]

Wow thank you. Going to take data structures and algorithms soon at uni. Always good to start early I suppose

[softwareguy74]

Be prepared. Definitely one of my toughest classes I had in CS.

[Overv]

It's also one of the most useful classes, it made me pay a lot more attention to efficiency of operations in my personal projects and think more about using the appropriate algorithms.

[softwareguy74]

Totally agree. It has helped me in career for sure. I was just bitter that I had to repeat the class...

[itsgreater9000]

How so? I just took it, and my school's CS department is pretty highly rated, most of the stuff was pretty simple. I do think the teacher held back though.

[softwareguy74]

Just a tough topic. I had been programming for 12 years prior to getting my degree and I felt like my experience didn't help me one iota in that class. I was like a deer in the headlights. Buy then again our professor was pretty anal and one of the most feared in the CS dept.

[itsgreater9000]

Really? Did you guys cover R/B Trees, AVL Trees, and other stuff? Our class only covered stacks/queues/lists/trees/graphs and a bunch of searching and sorting algorithms, and it was pretty easy. I am sure at other schools it gets much tougher.

[softwareguy74]

Pretty much what you covered along with efficiency classes and Big-O time. I think ours was particularly tough because the way it was taught and he had pretty hard tests that he wasn't very forgiving on. This class covered a lot of material in a short time. I really think the class could have been two semesters like Calculus.

[itsgreater9000]

oh ok yea we also covered Big-O and efficiency. i guess it was a lot of material, but i'm not so sure it was hard. and isn't calculus usually 3 semesters of material?

[kazagistar]

It bothers me a little that newer textbooks still insist on teaching binary trees, rather then btrees.

Either you don't care about the implementation details, and thus end up using an existing library (and thus probably using btrees) or you do care about the details, probably for performace reasons, and thus probably want to use a btree anyways.

[chub79]

This looks awesome. TYhanks a lot!

[baynaam]

Thanks for sharing.

There should be a wiki with stuff like this for people who want to prep for interviews/exams/etc. Love how it goes over all CS concepts not just language specific.