There are many books on data structures and algorithms, and some books laying out useful libraries of C functions, but this book aims to give you a unique combination of theoretical background and working code. In offering robust solutions for everyday programming tasks, Mastering Algorithms with C avoids the abstract style of most classic data structures and algorithms texts but still provides all the information you need to understand the purpose and use of common programming techniques. Implementations, as well as interesting, real-world examples of each data structure and algorithm, are shown in the text. Full source code appears on the accompanying disk. Using both a programming style and a writing style that are exceptionally clean, Kyle Loudon shows you how to use such essential data structures as lists, stacks, queues, sets, trees, heaps, priority queues, and graphs. He shows you how to use algorithms for sorting, searching, numerical analysis, data compression, data encryption, common graph problems, and computational geometry. He also describes the relative efficiency of all implementations. The compression and encryption chapters not only give you working code for reasonably efficient solutions, they explain concepts in an approachable manner for people who never have had the time or expertise to study them in depth. Anyone with a basic understanding of the C language can use this book. In order to provide maintainable and extendible code, an extra level of abstraction (such as pointers to functions) is used in examples where appropriate. Understanding that these techniques may be unfamiliar to some programmers, Loudon explains them clearly in the introductory chapters. Contents include:

• Pointers
• Recursion
• Analysis of algorithms
• Data structures (lists, stacks, queues, sets, hash tables, trees, heaps, priority queues, graphs)
• Sorting and searching
• Numerical methods
• Data compression
• Data encryption
• Graph algorithms
• Geometric algorithms

Good book; bad coding style,  October 27 2005
Submitted by Carl   [Respond | View]

O'Reilly should really release a second edition of this book with reformatted code. Single-line comments are expanded into seven lines because they put asterisks and newlines around everything. It makes the code very difficult to follow.

This is inexcusable, especially coming from a publisher with the reputation of O'Reilly. Please guys, redo this book! The material is excellent, but the source code is almost unusable.


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  February 26 2003
Submitted by Jason Greene   [Respond | View]

This is an excelent book. The author quite good at explaining complex material, and the combination of practical focus (unlike the purely theoretical focus of most books in this category), and plenty of example code makes this book a very quick read. This book has something for even those already well versed in this topic.




Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  July 08 2001
Submitted by John Lockwood   [Respond | View]

Overall I think Mr. Loudon did an oustanding job with this book. I wish I'd had it seven or eight years ago when I was first interested in this subject. Having clear explanations and code instead of dazzling displays of calculus makes this, to my mind, the outstanding book on the topic.

Having said that, I do have several quibbles, however. With other reviewers, I found the comment style to be good for the line count but a bit overdone, but sometimes sparse on some of the more difficult sections of code.

The complexities of some operations like double hashing might have been better shown in the text source (though understandably pushing both hashing methods out to the client is a design decision). Also more comparisons between closely related algorithms (chained versus open hashing comes to mind) would have been appreciated. In some respects I think the author was hamstrung by making all the chapters symetrical in structure (but it was a good structure).

Finally, I found the makefiles somewhat poorly structured; it would have been nice to have centralized the compiler, CFLAGS etc.


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  February 24 2001
Submitted by Chris Holt   [Respond | View]

Very good book. I liked basically everything about it

BUT!

the samples on the disk NEED to be put together better. In some cases I had to grab source files and copy them around in order to build a project. In some cases, the explanations in the book are excellent but the examples are a bit lacking although many of the example source files were very good.

I would agree with most other reviews in that the GIANT block comments need to be removed.




Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  January 04 2001
Submitted by Bugra Cakir   [Respond | View]

Very good for people who wants to learn the full story of data structures

algorithms based on C code. Codes mentioned in the Book are written with a bad style but author's knowledge and handling terms capability is excellent.


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  July 27 2000
Submitted by Andrew J. Woodward   [Respond | View]

have read a half-dozen or more books pertaining to C Algorithms, and most of them were the same. This touched on the usual stuff - sorting, hashing, linked lists, etc. But it touched on thesesubjects in ways that are so general purpose that the sample code can be used with little modification! It also adds a couple of new things such as Set algorithms and an explaination of how to pass functions as paramenters to functions.

There could have been a few more examples, and he could have explained some of his material in plain english, instead of engineerese.

Overall the book is excellent, and I will refer to it often.


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  June 20 2000
Submitted by Breandan Goodall   [Respond | View]

I bought this book back in February of this year (2000) as some sort of remedy after having digesting far to many chapters and books on programming in Java. This book has proved the most useful text for my course (1st year B.Sc. in Computer Science) even though C has sadly been absent from it. I learned more from the few pages in this book about Big-0 notation than I had after a week of lectures on the subject.

In reading the book you become aware of the writers obvious respect and pride in the algorithms being presented, and you will find that you too will appreciate what are the classic works of programming. The style and content of 'Mastering Algorithms with C' is very much like a digestible derivative of 'The Art of Programming' and should help in approaching that definitive tomb of volumes.

I thoroughly recommend this book to any Comp. Sci. student that has any sense at all of the craft or any pride in generating code that not only does the job, but does it in the most concise way possible.




Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  June 04 2000
Submitted by Bill   [Respond | View]

I've quite enjoyed reading this book. I bought it for one reason, the chapters on graphs and find myself flipping through other chapters just because they're there and catch my interest from time to time. The only other book I've been able to find on algorithms for C was "Data Strucures using C" and that has some really ugly reading. All in all, this was definately an O'Reilly book in depth and content.


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  May 05 2000
Submitted by K   [Respond | View]



The book is okay.
But be prepared to endure the code style writing. The way the author writes his comments inside the code will hurt your eyes and secondly will slow you down in reading the code. A single comment line without the freaking border which surrounds it is enough Kyle. The way you wrote the code just increased the book page number.
I don't know who reviwed your book but next time before publishing something ask for a second opinion from a guy who is not an engineer. IS NOT AESTETHIC !!!


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  March 10 2000
Submitted by Ben Clewett   [Respond | View]



I read and totally enjoyed this book. One of those books I have to take a
day off for, ring in sick, and read. It was such a revelation to find a well
written book with the code in place. I have since then used a number of the
structures included with great success. It has made a real difference to the
quality and speed of my code.

Ben Clewett, Road Tech Computer Systems



Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  December 08 1999
Submitted by Jonathan Headland   [Respond | View]



I'm just going to comment on one chapter of the
book: "Numerical Methods", the thirteenth.

Incredibly, Loudon presents a chapter on numerical methods without any discussion of the effects of the limitations imposed by the finite representation of numbers in C. No mention is made of the problems that occur when one tries to represent extremely large numbers or extemely small numbers (close to 0) in C, yet these are common situations when line gradients approach vertical or horizontal. Loudon presents C as though it was capable of representing numbers, when of course C is only capable of a very limited approximation to numbers.

Novices who enter the field of numerical methods without having been warned about the problem are going to risk producing very inaccurate results (and one presumes that some of the readers of this book may simply take the implementations of algorithms presented and apply them to the field they work in, be it analysis of biological experiment results, or investment performance analysis.)

The best Loudon does is to mention "Error Approximation" in the "Related Topics" section at the end of the chapter -- but please note, Loudon is referring to the problems of approximation in the algorithm itself, not the additional problems caused by implementing the algorithm in C where numbers are not represented exactly.

In summary, the problem here is that Loudon has written a useful chapter about some algorithms used in numerical methods, yet has completely failed to deal with the consequences of the implementation of those algorithms in C (surely the point of such a book as this?)
I'm really quite amazed that Loudon's editor at O'Reilly allowed such a serious omission to remain uncorrected. This part of the book is, in my opinion, extremely dangerous to the user, and must be corrected in the next edition.




Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  November 18 1999
Submitted by Anonymous   [Respond | View]



In general though, another fine book from O'Reilly, at a great price. I reccomend buying it at the same time as _Practical_C_Programming_-- you'll need it once you're done that book.


Mastering Algorithms with C Review,  November 03 1999
Submitted by David Kleman   [Respond | View]



I liked this book alot. It gives a clear overview over standard data structures, search algorithms, compression/encryption and some geometry algos. One thing i especially liked is that all chapters are divided in the same way. This makes the book easy to use as a reference. I'm only just starting out programming, and for me the difficulty of this book was perfect, the concepts are very general and doesn't go into too much detail. A great intro to algorithms. Cheap too:)