Product Description

Graph algorithms are critical for a wide range of applications, including network connectivity, circuit design, scheduling, transaction processing, and resource allocation. The latest in Robert Sedgewick's classic series on algorithms, this is the field's definitive guide to graph algorithms for C++. Far more than a "revision," this is a thorough rewriting, five times as long as the previous edition, with a new text design, innovative new figures, more detailed descriptions, and many new exercises -- all designed to dramatically enhance the book's value to developers, students, and researchers alike. The book contains six chapters covering graph properties and types, graph search, directed graphs, minimal spanning trees, shortest paths, and networks -- each with diagrams, sample code, and detailed descriptions intended to help readers understand the basic properties of as broad a range of fundamental graph algorithms as possible. The basic properties of these algorithms are developed from first principles; discussion of advanced mathematical concepts is brief, general, and descriptive, but proofs are rigorous and many open problems are discussed. Sedgewick focuses on practical applications, giving readers all the information and real (not pseudo-) code they need to confidently implement, debug, and use the algorithms he covers. (Also available: Algorithms in C++: Parts 1-4, Third Edition, ISBN: 0-201-35088-2).

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #763553 in Books
• Published on: 2002-01-16
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

From the Back Cover

Once again, Robert Sedgewick provides a current and comprehensive introduction to important algorithms. The focus this time is on graph algorithms, which are increasingly critical for a wide range of applications, such as network connectivity, circuit design, scheduling, transaction processing, and resource allocation. In this book, Sedgewick offers the same successful blend of theory and practice that has made his work popular with programmers for many years. Christopher van Wyk and Sedgewick have developed concise new C++ implementations that both express the methods in a natural and direct manner and also can be used in real applications.

Algorithms in C++, Third Edition, Part 5: Graph Algorithms is the second book in Sedgewick's thoroughly revised and rewritten series. The first book, Parts 1-4, addresses fundamental algorithms, data structures, sorting, and searching. A forthcoming third book will focus on strings, geometry, and a range of advanced algorithms. Each book's expanded coverage features new algorithms and implementations, enhanced descriptions and diagrams, and a wealth of new exercises for polishing skills. A focus on abstract data types makes the programs more broadly useful and relevant for the modern object-oriented programming environment.

Coverage includes:

• A complete overview of graph properties and types
• Diagraphs and DAGs
• Minimum spanning trees
• Shortest paths
• Network flows
• Diagrams, sample C++ code, and detailed algorithm descriptions

The Web site for this book (http://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rs/) provides additional source code for programmers along with a wide range of academic support materials for educators.

A landmark revision, Algorithms in C++, Third Edition, Part 5 provides a complete tool set for programmers to implement, debug, and use graph algorithms across a wide range of computer applications.

0201361183B11282001

About the Author

Robert Sedgewick is the William O. Baker Professor of Computer Science at Princeton University. He is a Director of Adobe Systems and has served on the research staffs at Xerox PARC, IDA, and INRIA. He earned his Ph.D from Stanford University under Donald E. Knuth.

0201361183AB06262002

---

Customer Reviews

Why do people like this book?
It is strange to me why some people love this book so much. Admittedly, Sedgewick is very respected in his field and knows a lot about sorting algorithms, but his book is still dissapointing and very frustrating to read for a beginning computer science student. He seldom includes complete code in his examples, and where there is code, there are sometimes errors in the code.

This reviewer took Sedgewick's class at Princeton University where this book was the required text, and not only was the text poor, his lectures were terribly boring. He himself even recognized that there were errors in his book, and so he allowed his students and TA's to submit errors found in the book. At the end of the year, the list of references to mistakes in the book took up more than three pages.

This review is not the result of a student upset about his grade (an A is fine with me), but is rather an attempt to warn students about the potential pitfalls that may be encountered in reading Sedgewick's book. I suppose this could be a great book for an intermediate or advanced CS student who doesn't mind the sparse and sometimes erroneous code or the terse language used to describe fairly complex ideas. Also, there are some parts of the book that are well written and a pleasure to read. However, I would never recomend this book to anyone interested in learning algorithms for this first time without a fair amount of prior programming experience.

Great text, but weak examples
This book covers the standard algorithms for searching, sorting, and some math, geometry, and graphing in a readable format. There is also some fun stuff including a brief section on the RSA cryptosystem. The code examples are very skimpy, leaving implementation to the reader, but the concepts are explained very well. Without doubt, a recommendation for intermediate programmers exploring these algorithms for the first or second time and for self-teaching.

could have been better
This book is definitely not suitable for a first course in data structures. However, the coverage of algorithms is excellent and the book is suitable for an intermediate level programmer. There is one major problem with the book: no complete source code examples. The better books on programming on the market today include fully worked out source code examples (usually on disk or available through the internet). This book only includes snippets of code, intended to illustrate key aspects of the algorithms. I wanted to work with some of the algorithms later in the book and found myself having to keep paging through earlier sections of the book to figure out what the data structures were supposed to look like. There was no centralized location from which I could pull this information, and in some cases the types/classes/routines were not available at all, and had to be inferred from the information that was present. Given the complexity of the C++ language when it comes to specifying data structures, this is a major flaw. Further, the lack of compilable code with well defined test cases makes it harder for the reader to verify there are no errors in the code samples that ARE provided.