The Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Monographs in Computer Science)

The Design and Analysis of Algorithms (Monographs in Computer Science)
The design and analysis of algorithms is one of the two essential cornerstone topics in computer science (the other being automata theory/theory of computation). Every computer scientist has a copy of Knuth's works on algorithms on his or her shelf. Dexter Kozen, a researcher and professor at Cornell University, has written a text for graduate study of algorithms. This will be an important reference book as well as being a useful graduate-level textbook.

Customer Review: covers a lot of topics, sometimes difficult to follow

This book covers a lot of interesting topics and is very up-to-date with current research results in the field. Its main drawback is that it has few examples. It is also at times hard to follow, unless the reader is already somehow familiar with the material.

Customer Review: Excellent supplementary text for a graduate course

This book is basically a set of lecture notes used by Prof. Kozen at Cornell, plus some practise 'homework' exercises.

As such, it isn't really a textbook, and can't be used as the only book for a course in the design and analysis of algorithms - for that, you'll need the books by Aho et al, or Cormen et al. (Knuth's books, of course are great for the topics they cover; and while on the book by Cormen et al, there's a second edition now, since September 2001).

However,this is an excellent self-study supplement. There are 40 lectures, each being a concise, self-contained discussion on a chosen topic. Thus, you get a condensed presentation of the important points, along with invaluable insights from Prof. Kozen.

Another feature which makes this a great option for self-study/rapid review is that each chapter ends with 'homeworks', for which answers have been provided. There's a set of miscellaneous exercises as well.

It is important to realize that this is a graduate text, for those who are already familiar with data structures and algorithms. This is not an introductory text by any means, and would ill serve that purpose.

The author presumes a fairly strong background in basic data structures and algorithms as well as mathematics on the part of the reader, without which it may be very difficult to follow the presentation.

All in all, if you're doing a graduate course in the design and analysis of algorithms, then this is a superb choice for self-study, practising problem-solving and rapid review of already familiar topics.

The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information Processing)

The Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms (Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science and Information Processing)
Customer Review: Very effective introduction to algorithms

The book used in my graduate Intro to Algorithms course, and I think the follow-on. While I am obviously not as well read in this subject as many of the other reviewers, I can say "it worked", and indeed worked well. A course that has a weak text or teacher will not inspire... A-H-O/DACA and Prof. Carlson made the material exciting, even to an "architecture guy". My interests in grad school in the early 80's revolved around tessellation automata (aka systolic arrays and other highly regular compute structures) and big steaming fast computer structures. A-H-O provided me with the best understanding of the kinds of problems faced by the computers which interested me the most, and the kinds of tools needed to understand computational impact and algorithmic structuring of solutions to them. I sincerely with I hadn't lost my copy with the hundreds of annotations in the margins.

Customer Review: still the classic

One of the classics -- a readable and practical textbook with dozens of problems and projects. Great as a reference to basic data structures and algorithms, too!

Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology

Algorithms on Strings, Trees and Sequences: Computer Science and Computational Biology
String algorithms are a traditional area of study in computer science. In recent years their importance has grown dramatically with the huge increase of electronically stored text and of molecular sequence data produced by various genome projects. This book explains a wide range of computer methods for string processing. It also contains extensive discussions on biological problems that are cast as string problems, and on techniques to solve them. The book is both a reference for computer scientists and computer-oriented professionals in biology and bio-informatics and a textbook for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses on string algorithms and on computational biology.

Customer Review: phenomenal

This book is absolutely excellent. Gusfield walks the reader from simple concepts in string matching through advanced in a way that I found very easy to follow. Every bioinformatics researcher should have copy of this text.

Customer Review: Well Written Text Book

A well written text book with an obvious bias to biological application, but maybe most useful for its clear explanation and rigour of string algorithms.