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

Presenting the PageRank algorithm

As a practical example, let's look at the PageRank algorithm, which was initially used by Google to rank the search results of a user query. It generates a number that quantifies the importance of search results in the context of the query the user has executed. This was designed by two Ph.D. students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at Stanford in the late 1990s, who also went on to start Google.

The PageRank algorithm was named after Larry Page, who created it with Sergey Brin while studying at Stanford University.

Let's first formally define the problem for which PageRank was initially designed.

Problem definition

Whenever a user enters a query on a search engine on the web, it typically...