01 / Classic Textbook Recommendation
Classic Textbook Recommendation
Who this book is for
Students taking their first algorithms course, and programmers who want a careful but readable route through the material that standard textbooks cover in a more compressed way. It also suits self-learners following the author's video lectures, since the book and the videos are organised in the same order and can be used together.
Prerequisites
Some programming experience and basic familiarity with mathematical proofs, such as induction, at the level of a first discrete mathematics course.
What it covers
Asymptotic notation; divide-and-conquer algorithms, including merge sort, Karatsuba multiplication and the master method; randomized quicksort and selection; graph search, connectivity and Dijkstra's shortest-path algorithm; heaps, search trees, hash tables and Bloom filters; greedy algorithms for scheduling, Huffman codes and minimum spanning trees; dynamic programming, including sequence alignment and the Bellman-Ford and Floyd-Warshall algorithms; NP-hard problems and strategies for tackling them, including heuristics and local search.
How to use it
Cormen's Algorithms Unlocked is a short, non-technical tour for general readers; this book is a complete first course with proofs, quizzes and programming problems. Prefer it when you are ready to study algorithms properly but want more explanation than a reference textbook gives. Pair each chapter with the matching video and attempt the end-of-chapter problems.
Edition and sources
Omnibus Edition, a hardback published in 2022 that gathers the four parts of the series in one volume (ISBN 9780999282984); copyright is held by Soundlikeyourself Publishing and Cambridge University Press distributes it. Bibliographic data for this record comes from Cambridge University Press.