TopCoder: Algorithm Tutorials | Hacker News Reader

TopCoder: Algorithm Tutorials

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258 pointssayemm26 comments

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387948600/ref=ase_th... might work better for some.

And also its awesome home page: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/

Click through to some of the actual algorithm pages, for instance the Traveling Salesman Problem: http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/files/traveling-salesman....

Great book, great site.

Absolutely. Think they have a kindle edition out too.. its going to be cheaper.

The book hits the sweet spot for most practical folks and also has great theoretical connectors / flow.

After someone spends around six months of working / implementing things out of joy, you will be able to discern what to keep or reject from other sources.

The Kindle version is of the 1998 edition and is available in the US only; which is more than a bit rubbish.

err.. I am based in Australia, got the 2008 / 2nd edition on kindle just fine.

another url -> http://www.algorist.com

So? I've on occasion changed my Kindle account address to the U.K. (Amazon's office in Slough, more specifically), ordered a U.K.-only book (back when AMZN and the publishers were having their public spat) and changed my address back. I suspect the same might work in reverse.

It's a kludge, but it works.

And has unfavorable reviews on amazon. I'll wait for the second edition on Kindle.

Steven Skiena was one of the most enlightening professors I've had the pleasure to be lectured at during my education at SUNY Stony Brook.

It is worth mentioning that further within this link he has posted video lectures from 1997 and 2007, along with audio and presentation slides:

(Analysis of Algorithms Course):

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~algorith/video-lectures/

(Programming Challenges Course):

http://www.algorithm.cs.sunysb.edu/programmingchallenges/

I personally learned from Skienna's other book Programming Challenges first (http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Challenges-Steven-S-Skiena...). Then when my knowledge had matured a bit, I was able to digest The Algorithm Design Manual a little better.

In case you've not already, head toward http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/ and experience further bliss.

Does any one know what the "ref=ase_thealgorithmrepo/" at the end of the url means? If I remove it, it doesn't seem to change anything.

It's a referral id. It basically tells Amazon who sent you; in this case "thealgorithmrepo", which is probably the folks in SkyMarshal's link below.

tracking what you clicked on to get to the product page.

does not change the page itself. If you want to have fun you can change it to "ref=monkey_poo" as I am wont to do.

Does this mean they would get any affiliate commission if I buy the book through this link?

Seems like it would be nice to help them out.

bless the author then, to solve the mystery, the referral code is simply the one here :

http://www.cs.sunysb.edu/~skiena/#books

Thanks!

To be clear, I wasn't trying to imply anything sneaky going on. I was curious as to what these parameters mean :)

I appreciate the response

I second him. My entry "ref=kung_fu_panda" impacts a mysterious star somewhere in Messier 36.

So does this mean one could earn affiliate revenue from your purchases by registering as an affiliate called monkey_poo, or do they not allow you to choose your ID?

Would totally buy if there was an e-book version.

Am I the only one that thinks the tutorials are a bit weird. For example: their QuickSort implementation looks pretty much "sub-optimal"". ( They allocate new arrays in each recursive call ) Another example: Shortest-Path search. A-Star is not mentioned.

I suffer at times from being too polite. Thanks for starting the drilling.

Agreed but you have to keep in mind what the algorithms are being used for.

You're going to have better luck implementing Dijkstra's quickly in a competition than you are A-Star. Not to mention A-Star is based mostly on heuristics and if you don't have time (or don't care) then bad heuristics makes it just as fast as Dikstra's.

Regarding A-star, it doesn't generally come up in this kind of contest. When you are doing a TopCoder/ICPC/Project Euler problem and you need to find shortest paths, you need exact solutions because you want your result to match the judges' result. In a programming contest in which the programs compete against each other, instead of passing or failing, A-star would be much more important.

One note to make is that these tutorials are specifically designed for programming contests not for the real world. A lot of the stuff applies to both, but things like constant factor optimization and heuristics are generally not part of programming classes and a huge part of the real world.

I think the Top Coder tutorials are really thought provoking and they cover a lot of ground. A really good summary of the core concepts which you can further research.

Thanks!

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