There are many books on data structures and algorithms, and some books laying out useful libraries of C functions, but this book aims to give you a unique combination of theoretical background and working code. In offering robust solutions for everyday programming tasks, Mastering Algorithms with C avoids the abstract style of most classic data structures and algorithms texts but still provides all the information you need to understand the purpose and use of common programming techniques. Implementations, as well as interesting, real-world examples of each data structure and algorithm, are shown in the text. Full source code appears on the accompanying disk. Using both a programming style and a writing style that are exceptionally clean, Kyle Loudon shows you how to use such essential data structures as lists, stacks, queues, sets, trees, heaps, priority queues, and graphs. He shows you how to use algorithms for sorting, searching, numerical analysis, data compression, data encryption, common graph problems, and computational geometry. He also describes the relative efficiency of all implementations. The compression and encryption chapters not only give you working code for reasonably efficient solutions, they explain concepts in an approachable manner for people who never have had the time or expertise to study them in depth. Anyone with a basic understanding of the C language can use this book. In order to provide maintainable and extendible code, an extra level of abstraction (such as pointers to functions) is used in examples where appropriate. Understanding that these techniques may be unfamiliar to some programmers, Loudon explains them clearly in the introductory chapters. Contents include:

• Pointers

• Recursion

• Analysis of algorithms

• Data structures (lists, stacks, queues, sets, hash tables, trees, heaps, priority queues, graphs)

• Sorting and searching

• Numerical methods

• Data compression

• Data encryption

• Graph algorithms

• Geometric algorithms

Amazon.com® Reader Reviews (Ranked by Helpfulness)

Average Amazon.com® Rating:  Based on 15 Ratings

good, concise algorithm book ruined by comment - 2004-12-13
Reviewer Rating:
compare to most algorithm/data structure books out there, this book is not as complete as those, but it's much easier to read, and diagrams in this book is well drawn and much eaiser to follow. Why would I only give it 3 stars? One thing really ruined this book - obviously the publisher/editor/author try to increase the total page number by putting ridiculously big comment block in sample code(single line comments takes about 5 lines, all surrounded by '*' and spaces) This made the sample code difficult to read, imagine a 5 line function has to be printed in 2 or 3 pages.

Good book, but HORRIBLE CODING STYLE!!! - 2004-11-09
Reviewer Rating:
The book contents is good, the algorithms presented are more or less well explained and the implementeations themselves are not bad (but could be better).

Unfortunately this book has 2 mayor problems:

Sometimes you need an implementation of an algorithm for which you already know the inner-workings, just need quick code instead of reinvening the wheel yourself... the book will not allways give you that, it will sometimes build an algorithm based on previous ones! Darn!, I am supposed to go straight to the point I want and get the code without having to read a couple of previous sections.

Second and worst of all is the coding style this guy has. I don't know what the other reviwer that said that the code is great programs in but certainly not in C. The author of the book simply has the worst style ever... look at the comments, a one line comment surrounded by a box!!! give-me-a-break!... where did he learn this? He should read a book about style, perhaps read Code Complete by Steve McConnel or something before attempting to write code. Anyway this is just one of the many style flaws this book has.

If I could I would return it, after all, you can get mostly any implementation from the internet (I had to do that or would have wasted lots of time and... time is money).

If well written, the book would have been 1/2 its size and then it would have been good.

Why 3 stars? Well, in spite of the poor programming style and bad presentation of some algorithms, if you have time and patience, you get someting out of the book. Just don't use the coding style he uses... if you try that at work you would be fired or at least laughed at.

Considering 'Algorithms with C' - 2008-05-18
Reviewer Rating:
Things I didn't know when I ordered this book was how structured the book was. It's easy to comprehend and doesn't contain too much unnecessary information. Furthermore, what I also managed to miss was the disc which was included, and this contains more in-depth code, which allows one to check a whole program instead of only a part.
It is definitely a good decision to start with buying this book if you're studying Algorithms with C, since this will truly help and support you on your way.

Good book, bad code... it could be better... - 2008-08-02
Reviewer Rating:
Hi:

Well, this book has a lot of very interesting programming issues, like pointers, recursion, linked lists, stacks & queues, trees, etc, etc...
All of these issues are very well explained and have many code examples, but here is the big problem of this book:
The comment style of the code examples is ridiculous!!!
The author used five lines of code when he could use only one!!!
Like this:

/*********************
*
* Absurd comment...
*
*********************/

This makes slower and really uncomfortable the lecture of the code.

Anyway, having this book you'll learn a lot of advanced C programming issues.

Probably OK - 2007-07-15
Reviewer Rating:
The book is probably OK, but there are better, much better ones on the subject. I highly recommend looking at "The Algorithm Design Manual", just search Amazon and you'll find it.

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