Chapter 1, About Performance, talks about performance. We'll dissect the term itself and try to find out what users actually mean when they say that a program is performing (or not performing) well. Then, we will move into the area of algorithm complexity. We'll skip all the boring mathematics and just mention the parts relevant to programming. We will also look at different ways of finding the slow (non-performant) parts of the program, from pure guesswork to measuring tools of a different sophistication, homemade and commercial.
Chapter 2, Fixing the Algorithm, examines a few practical examples where changing an algorithm can speed up a program dramatically. In the first part, we'll look at graphical user interfaces ...
