Algorithms in C, Parts 1-4: Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching (3rd Edition) | 
 enlarge | Author: Robert Sedgewick
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional
Category: Book
List Price: $64.99
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Avg. Customer Rating:  20 reviews
Sales Rank: 200314
Media: Paperback
Edition: 3
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 720
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.4
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7.7 x 1
ISBN: 0201314525
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.133
UPC: 785342314526
EAN: 9780201314526
ASIN: 0201314525
Publication Date: September 27, 1997
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Condition: clean pages good condition overall tight spine All new inventory received to basement All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Your purchase supports More Than Words, a nonprofit job training program for youth, empowering youth to take charge of their lives by taking charge of a business.
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Product Description
Covers fundamental data structures and algorithms for sorting, searching, and related applications. Includes expanded coverage of arrays, linked lists, strings, trees, and other basic data structures. Contains many examples. Paper. DLC: C (Computer program language)
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| Customer Reviews: Read 15 more reviews...
 A Classic on Algorithms... June 27, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
...that is as relevant today as when it was first written.
As a computer scientist for 20 years, few books have had as long lasting an impact as this book. What has always amazed me is that once you've worked your way through an algorithm, and Sedgewick's explanation, you remember it. For me, it was, and still is, a foundation of computer science and as ready a reference today.
Really liked the writing style, Sedgewick does a good job of keeping the explanation human-friendly. Face it, it's a book on algorithms, not quite a summer reading beach book. :-)
All told, I put this book up with the Knuth series...btw, Sedgewick was a student of Knuth's.
Enjoy, and hope it helps out as it did me.
Great book a must have November 5, 2006
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is one of the best book that I have ever read. The writer explained data stucture in a very good detail.
However, this is NOT a book for those beginers, writer assumed that readers must have some strong background in both C programming and math. As many C code functions are left out.
There is a clear difference between IT and computer science, if you just make web pages, click mouse in windows, know a little bit about programming, you will find this is a book hard to read and follow. On the other hand if you are computer scientist, digging underground understanding of lists, tree, pattern matching. This book is, undoubtedly the one to go.
 SedgeWork June 20, 2006
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
If you purchase this book as I did then be prepared to expend quite a lot of energy to derive any useful learning from this text. I am in full agreement with many of the other reviewers here as to the quality of this book. And I am not just referring to the numerous glaring typos and off-by-one errors but what seems to be a fundamental inability of this author to be able to explain himself in a clear, coherent manner. I do not expect the quality or caliber of say a "Richard Stevens", on every technical publication but this work is below par from what one would expect from a "professor". I have read many technical books over the years, on protocols, programming languages and data structures and algorithms. Reading through the text, and for books like this, compiling and running the examples, is par for the course. You learn by doing not just by reading alone. But a balance should be maintained.
It does have some redeeming qualities. It does cover a fair amount of material about algorithms. It does offer insight not available elsewhere (at least not in book form). But this is not a reference work you can look at while coding at work and pull some algorithm out of that you forget the details about.
Some say this work is densely populated. I believe this to be a misunderstanding. This book is terse in some respects and filled with circumlocutions in other places. An example of a dense, and yet clear and concise technical book would be "The Annotated C++ Reference Manual".
The author leaves out so many fundamental and subtle points regarding the subject matter that no student could hope to come away with a thorough understanding -- unless of course you perform the following:
type_the_examples();
for (i = 0; i < MaxTimesBeforeBecomingFrustrated; i++)
{
study_section_of_text();
for(j = 0; j < RunTimesBeforeYouForgetWhatYouWereStudying; j++)
{
run_code();
examine_output();
analyze_program_source();
fix_errors_and_assumptions_from_text();
compile();
}
}
Assumptions are made with the code examples that require careful attention on the readers part or you WILL end up with Segmentation faults.
The book does provide the material needed to form a basis in exploring ideas in the covered algorithms. But I found that I had to read through the code examples and run the examples to be able to meaningfully interpret what the text was stating. The examples usually form a basis for reinforcing the reader's understanding of the text but with this book this paradigm is inverted; without the code examples it would be futile.
The author mentions, justifiably so, that changing the input data would change the runtime characteristics of some particular program. Well, try this with numerous examples in the text and you will demonstrate first hand not how the performance might change but just how fragile the code is as witnessed by your accompanying seg fault.
In the end, you can learn from this text but it requires a great deal of work, and quite a lot of debugging; more so that what is normally necessary. Learning any technical matter is work for the most part but learning from this text is, in my experience not enjoyable work. The above issues end up distracting the reader from being able to focus on learning the algorithms which is supposedly the reason you bought the book in the first place. My fear is that any young reader (all but the most ardent), who picks up this book as his/her first book on Algorithms will be turned off from Computer Science for good. We have enough of those books already.
I'm fed up with these books March 22, 2006
3 out of 5 found this review helpful
I bought these two book for one reason: to get help implementing algorithms. Since there is lot of code in these books, I thought this would be a good pick. I was wrong. The author is consistently leaving out details vital to understanding the code. He also makes a big deal about abstract data types. This is gloriously of the case. If the readers are supposed to understand the code, transperency would be a more intelligent goal for the author. There are no comments in the code what so ever (yes, this is actually true, not even in the on-line code). The on-line code to this book is a total mess. You would be able to implement all the algorithms from scratch in less time than it would take you to try an piece together the code the author has left for you. The pity is that there are very few other algorithm books that have real code.
Instead of moving on to writing C++ and Java editions of this book, the author should fix the problems with this book and the part 5 book.
Demand a new edition from the author and don't by this one unless you can avoid it. You deserve better.
 why someone give the book 5 star? June 9, 2001
6 out of 56 found this review helpful
this is the first algorithms book i read, this is last robert sedgewick book i read.
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