Algorithms Illuminated: Part 1: The Basics

This is Part 1 of a 4-part beautifully written textbook on Algorithms, suitable for someone who has already learned the basics of Data Structures. I taught out of this book (got thru most of Part 4) and can't sing its praises enough. The writing is engaging, the examples seem to flow seamlessly (obviously the result of a lot of thought on the part of the author) and the proofs of correctness are at just the right level. There are related videos on youtube, and about half my students went back and forth between the book and the videos. I have taught the Algorithms course out of several of the other popular books but this book has the others beat hands down for clarity, motivation, and explanation of correctness.

I took his courses on coursera and have notes from the course, I bought the book(s) for keepsake. The book is for you, if you prefer reading to video. Reading is faster especially for reference. The examples are great at illustrating the algorithms. This is for you if you want to fully understand the algorithms and implement them yourself. If you like a recipe book there are better books. It also expects you to write your own code but it gets easier after you work on implementing a few algorithms since you will get to re-use code. It is great to listen to the professor and catch some excitement about the algorithms so you may want to watch the lectures anyway and use the books as reference. He has maintained the conversational tone in the book as well but it is great to see on the video. The course is not meant to be comprehensive, but you will get the essentials and be really confident of the algorithms you learn. So this won't be the only book you will need for algorithms, as the professor himself claims. As the title says it is about illustrating the algorithms.

Prof. Roughgarden is my all-time favorite instructor. His style is clear, concise, humorous, and direct to the essence of algorithms, 5 minutes can make clear what my instructor failed to for a semester. Prof. Roughgarden has impacted me profoundly on three levels. First, he made the algorithm knowledge clear and I may owe my future job to him. Second, he ignited my passion for algorithm, math, and general computer science, the journey is so fun guided by a charming master. The third level inspiration was his direct-to-the-essence minimalist philosophy, things get simple after you know the essence and only in this way can you hold more. Thank you so much Prof. Roughgarden and Merry Christmas!!!

Learning algorithms can be daunting, specially for a novice or a person with a non CS background. Professor Roughgarden's books however go the extra mile to make this learning as easy and painless as possible. Together with the learning videos on youtube, these books have become my goto repositories for algorithmic understanding. Compared to many other algorithmic books, that are math intensive and obtuse, these are to the point, easy to read and peppered with a lot of examples that help in understanding the nuts and bolts of the algorithms under consideration and give good starting point for algorithmic learning. A must have guide for beginner CS learners.

If I need to evaluate the content I will give it 5 stars, the content is excellent the problem is in the quality of the book, some pages started to come loose, but the content is excellent

Seriously... his algorithms courses on Coursera completely changed the way I looked at and thought about problems and concepts in computer science. The theoretical foundations he helped me establish even assisted me in landing my dream job straight out of university at one of the world's largest tech companies! In my four years of undergrad computer science education I never once had a professor who was able to clearly distill the essence of algorithms and data structures, or even instill the motivation for why it's so important to master these concepts in the way that Roughgarden did. What I loved the most about his teaching style was being walked through a curated list of the "greatest hits" of computer science while being shown what it was about those key insights about a certain algorithm or technique that could be exploited in a more general form to solve whole classes of similar problems. I think this is one of the things I've noticed lacking in a lot of modern education; the primitives are taught, but usually in an unimaginative format, and the mindset/ability to compose those primitives to solve more complex problems is never really cultivated. My only advice for anyone working through this book is to have patience and be persistent. This style of analysis/thinking may be very different than what you're used to if your experience in the education system was anything like mine in North American public schools - but it will pay off. Roughgarden even recommends referring to the free lecture notes of Mathematics for Computer Science in the beginning of the book if you need a refresher. You can also find forums where you can discuss math topics all over the internet, use them! I will be recommending this book to anyone who's looking to establish a more rigorous understanding of the foundational concepts of computer science. I'm confident that this series will eventually become known as one of the "greatest hits" in computer science literature : )

This book is a great book. I like to see it as legendary and tool every computer scientist must have.

A very clear, well-written book, that I highly recommend. The author, Tim Roughgarden, has taught this material to Stanford computer science students for many years, and has been honing his exposition all the while. This has resulted in a masterful piece of writing. It is the first of what is to become a series of small texts that cover the same content as the Coursera Algorithms Specialization. Each of these texts will cover one of the courses in that specialization. I also recommend the Coursera lectures that go with this text. This book is thus ideally suited for individual study.

I read a lot of algorithms book, this one is the best!

Hace 16 años que soy programador profesional. Casi todos los contenidos los recuerdo aún de la universidad, pero nunca está de más volver a repasarlos para entender cosas nuevas. Ser una persona con experiencia no ha evitado que conozca nuevos tipos de algoritmos de algoritmos, como counting sort o radix sort. Incluso por fin he entendido el Quick Sort... y me he dado cuenta de que es infinitamente más sencillo de lo que a priori parece, gracias a la fantástica redacción y amenidad de este libro.

Da comprare

MOOCの教科書なので買ってみた。普通，多くのアルゴリズム本より高度かと思う。ページ数の関係か説明が短い。アメリカの教科書の割には読みにくい。MOOCを使わずに独学するならいわゆるアメリカの教科書って感じの分厚いアルゴリズム本のほうが読みやすいと思います。

Most of the pages are basically a scanned image where you either select everything or nothing. So, I don't recommend if you like to add notes while reading. It becomes a tedious work.