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

Data Structures Used in Algorithms

Algorithms need necessary in-memory data structures that can hold temporary data while executing. Choosing the right data structures is essential for their efficient implementation. Certain classes of algorithms are recursive or iterative in logic and need data structures that are specially designed for them. For example, a recursive algorithm may be more easily implemented, exhibiting better performance, if nested data structures are used. In this chapter, data structures are discussed in the context of algorithms. As we are using Python in this book, this chapter focuses on Python data structures, but the concepts presented in this chapter can be used in other languages such as Java and C++.

By the end of this chapter, you should be able to understand how Python handles complex data structures and which one should be used for a certain...