Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

By : Imran Ahmad
5 (2)
Book Image

40 Algorithms Every Programmer Should Know

5 (2)
By: Imran Ahmad

Overview of this book

Algorithms have always played an important role in both the science and practice of computing. Beyond traditional computing, the ability to use algorithms to solve real-world problems is an important skill that any developer or programmer must have. This book will help you not only to develop the skills to select and use an algorithm to solve real-world problems but also to understand how it works. You’ll start with an introduction to algorithms and discover various algorithm design techniques, before exploring how to implement different types of algorithms, such as searching and sorting, with the help of practical examples. As you advance to a more complex set of algorithms, you'll learn about linear programming, page ranking, and graphs, and even work with machine learning algorithms, understanding the math and logic behind them. Further on, case studies such as weather prediction, tweet clustering, and movie recommendation engines will show you how to apply these algorithms optimally. Finally, you’ll become well versed in techniques that enable parallel processing, giving you the ability to use these algorithms for compute-intensive tasks. By the end of this book, you'll have become adept at solving real-world computational problems by using a wide range of algorithms.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1: Fundamentals and Core Algorithms
7
Section 2: Machine Learning Algorithms
13
Section 3: Advanced Topics

Overview of Algorithms

This book covers the information needed to understand, classify, select, and implement important algorithms. In addition to explaining their logic, this book also discusses data structures, development environments, and production environments that are suitable for different classes of algorithms. We focus on modern machine learning algorithms that are becoming more and more important. Along with the logic, practical examples of the use of algorithms to solve actual everyday problems are also presented.

This chapter provides an insight into the fundamentals of algorithms. It starts with a section on the basic concepts needed to understand the workings of different algorithms. This section summarizes how people started using algorithms to mathematically formulate a certain class of problems. It also mentions the limitations of different algorithms. The next section explains the various ways to specify the logic of an algorithm. As Python is used in this book to write the algorithms, how to set up the environment to run the examples is explained. Then, the various ways that an algorithm's performance can be quantified and compared against other algorithms are discussed. Finally, this chapter discusses various ways a particular implementation of an algorithm can be validated.

To sum up, this chapter covers the following main points:

  • What is an algorithm?

  • Specifying the logic of an algorithm

  • Introducing Python packages

  • Algorithm design techniques

  • Performance analysis

  • Validating an algorithm