Absolutely. Think they have a kindle edition out too.. its going to be cheaper.
The book hits the sweet spot for most practical folks and also has great theoretical connectors / flow.
After someone spends around six months of working / implementing things out of joy, you will be able to discern what to keep or reject from other sources.
So? I've on occasion changed my Kindle account address to the U.K. (Amazon's office in Slough, more specifically), ordered a U.K.-only book (back when AMZN and the publishers were having their public spat) and changed my address back. I suspect the same might work in reverse.
So does this mean one could earn affiliate revenue from your purchases by registering as an affiliate called monkey_poo, or do they not allow you to choose your ID?
Am I the only one that thinks the tutorials are a bit weird.
For example: their QuickSort implementation looks pretty much "sub-optimal"". ( They allocate new arrays in each recursive call )
Another example: Shortest-Path search. A-Star is not mentioned.
Agreed but you have to keep in mind what the algorithms are being used for.
You're going to have better luck implementing Dijkstra's quickly in a competition than you are A-Star. Not to mention A-Star is based mostly on heuristics and if you don't have time (or don't care) then bad heuristics makes it just as fast as Dikstra's.
Regarding A-star, it doesn't generally come up in this kind of contest. When you are doing a TopCoder/ICPC/Project Euler problem and you need to find shortest paths, you need exact solutions because you want your result to match the judges' result. In a programming contest in which the programs compete against each other, instead of passing or failing, A-star would be much more important.
One note to make is that these tutorials are specifically designed for programming contests not for the real world. A lot of the stuff applies to both, but things like constant factor optimization and heuristics are generally not part of programming classes and a huge part of the real world.
I think the Top Coder tutorials are really thought provoking and they cover a lot of ground. A really good summary of the core concepts which you can further research.
