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Algorithms in C, Parts 1-4: Fundamentals, Data Structures, Sorting, Searching (3rd Edition)
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Author: Robert Sedgewick
List Price: $57.99
Our Price: Click to see the latest and low price
ISBN: 0201314525
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co (17 September, 1997)
Edition: Paperback
Sales Rank: 40,657
Average Customer Rating: 3.12 out of 5
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Customer ReviewsRating: 1 out of 5
why someone give the book 5 star?
this is the first algorithms book i read, this is last robert sedgewick book i read.
Rating: 3 out of 5
Authoritative exposition, needs debugging
Prof. Sedgewick is a noted authority on searching and sorting algorithms, and a former student of Knuth's. The text is authoritative, lucid, and detailed. It is also full of mistakes, poorly edited, and much of the code has serious and not so serious bugs.I have the second, corrected printing of this edition. If you purchase this book, consider buying Bently's "Programming Perls" or some other book on debugging software, and consider Sedgewick's book to be an excellent opportunity to debug a standard reference in CS. In addition to scrutinizing the source code, don't accept any statement in Sedgewick unequivocally. Even his formula for computing the variance of a distribution is incorrect (the accompanying code is correct, though it magnifies the roundoff error; read "Numerical Recipies in C" by Press et al for a more civilized calculation). Many of his proofs have off by one errors, he misdefines the "transitive" property as "associative". Get the lastest printing available, eventually enough students and instructors will have gone through this book to ferret out most of its errors. There are no giant lapses in reasoning, and once it makes it out of beta, this should be a very fine book. A much better investment would be "Introduction to Algorithms" by Cormen, Lieserson, Rivest, a vastly superior and more interesting text. It has far greater scope of coverage on the subject of algorithms, and is both clearer and more carefully written, one of the most illuminating books I've read. However, volume 1 of Sedgewick, as it focuses solely on searching and sorting, covers these areas in greater depth, and discusses practical implementation issues, such as sentinels and hybrid sorts. As such, Sedgewick is a good compliment to CLR. Bear in mind that it is more densely written than CLR, and hence requires a more careful reading.
Rating: 2 out of 5
ERRONIOUS CODE!!! How can you trust the rest of the book?
Errors start right from the beginning with code listing 1.2 ( three errors in four liner) and goes on with ambiguous coding style. Even for a junior programmer it won't be proper to make his code public with such an errors.If you want to debug authors code for free, this is the book for you. However, considering that it is third edition already and errors are still there, the author probably won't care much if you correct it anyway. Or does he? Yes, I was frustrated, wasting two hours of beautiful Saturday morning on scraping supposedly impeccable code. His acclaimed teacher Dr. Knuth was smarter providing code in 'toy' language that nobody use, test or bother to correct even for $1K, but he at least never promised to provide you any useful code. In general, easy readable text, good style, much better than some other books, but yet, superfluous coverage of algorithms analysis. It would have been less misleading if author drops 'in C' for something implementation independent. But on the contrary, the author went on with 'in C++', 'in Java'. Given the pattern of lax coding here, I wonder are those books just as 'slippery'. As for algorithms in C, I think that even the related parts of "Introductory C" by Petersen will be more useful. It works there.
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