February 2022
Beginner to intermediate
572 pages
13h
English
Content preview from An Introduction to Formal Languages and Automata, 7th Edition
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14.1 EFFICIENCY OF COMPUTATION
Let us start with a concrete example. Given a list of one thousand integers, we want to sort them in some way, say in ascending order. Sorting is a simple problem but also one that is very fundamental in computer science. If we now ask the question, “How long will it take to do this task?” we see immediately that much more information is needed before we can answer it. Clearly, the number of items in the list plays an important role in how much time will be taken, but there are other factors. There is the question of what computer we use and how we write the program. Also, there are a number of sorting methods so that selection of the algorithm is important. There are probably a few more things you can think of ...
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.