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Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition
book

Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition

by Jon Bentley
September 1999
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
256 pages
7h 38m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Programming Pearls, 2nd Edition

Column 1: Cracking the Oyster

The programmer’s question was simple: “How do I sort a disk file?” Before I tell you how I made my first mistake, let me give you a chance to do better than I did. What would you have said?

1.1 A Friendly Conversation

My mistake was to answer his question. I gave him a thumbnail sketch of how to implement a Merge Sort on disk. My suggestion that he dig into an algorithms text met with less than enthusiasm — he was more concerned about solving the problem than furthering his education. I then told him about a disk sorting program in a popular programming book. The program consisted of about two hundred lines of code in a dozen functions; I estimated that implementing and testing the code would have taken the programmer ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780134498058Purchase book